Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his vast expertise across fields, which became a rarity after his lifetime with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of specialized labor. He wrote works on philosophy , theology , ethics , politics , law , history , philology , games , music , and other studies.
Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology , and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory , biology , medicine , geology , psychology , linguistics and computer science. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, French and German.
As a philosopher, he was a leading representative of 17th-century rationalism and idealism. As a mathematician, his major achievement was the development of the main ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Newton's contemporaneous developments. In the 20th century, Leibniz's notions of the law of continuity and transcendental law of homogeneity found a consistent mathematical formulation by means of non-standard analysis.
He was also a pioneer in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator , he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in [ 25 ] and invented the Leibniz wheel , later used in the arithmometer , the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. In philosophy and theology , Leibniz is most noted for his optimism , i. His philosophy also assimilates elements of the scholastic tradition, notably the assumption that some substantive knowledge of reality can be achieved by reasoning from first principles or prior definitions.
The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and still influences contemporary analytic philosophy , such as its adopted use of the term " possible world " to define modal notions. Leibniz's father had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig , where he also served as dean of philosophy. The boy inherited his father's personal library.
