Dropping In on Gottfried Leibniz: A Computational Visionary Ahead of His Time

Dropping in on Gottfried Leibniz (2013)

I recently visited Gottfried Leibniz's archive in Hanover, marveling at his yellowed notes that reveal a mind centuries ahead of its time. Leibniz dreamed of a universal system to derive all knowledge through calculation, much like my work with Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. His innovative notation and relentless pursuit of formalizing thought show a core intellectual direction curiously close to modern computational science.

"It's always struck me as a remarkable anomaly in the history of thought that it took until the 1930s for the idea of universal computation to emerge."