Dropping In on Gottfried Leibniz

Stephen Wolfram:

I've been curious about Gottfried Leibniz for years, not least because he seems to have wanted to build something like Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and perhaps A New Kind of Science as well--though three centuries too early. So when I took a trip recently to Germany, I was excited to be able to visit his archive in Hanover.

Leafing through his yellowed (but still robust enough for me to touch) pages of notes, I felt a certain connection--as I tried to imagine what he was thinking when he wrote them, and tried to relate what I saw in them to what we now know after three more centuries:

Some things, especially in mathematics, are quite timeless. Like here's Leibniz writing down an infinite series for √2 (the text is in Latin):

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 20, 2013 1:32 AM
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