350th birthday of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1996 - 100 Pfennig

The mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born on 1 July 1646 in Leipzig. After visiting the Nicolaischule in Leipzig, he studied philosophy and jurisprudence at the Universities of Leipzig and Jena. In 1667 he earned a law degree from the University of Altdorf. From 1672 he spent four years shaping his scientific development in Paris. In 1673, he introduced a model of his calculator to the Royal Society in London. In the following years he developed in Paris the differential and integral calculus. From 1676 he lived as a councilor and librarian at the Hanoverian princely court. His philosophical works - most influential were the Théodicée and the Nouveaux Essais sur l'entendement humain (New Treatises on the Human Understanding) - were often written in French. His dynamics as a theory of the physical forces was based on the idea of ​​conservation. In many years of negotiations Leibniz tried to unite the Protestant and the Catholic Church. He was the first to conceive a calculator based on the binary number system. Leibniz made important contributions in the field of history and linguistics. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died on November 14, 1716 in Hannover. (Text: Lower Saxony State Library, Leibniz Archive, Hannover)