The best of all possible worlds A life of Leibniz in seven pivotal days

This challenging debut biography from historian Kempe details seven eventful moments in the life of German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646--1716). Kempe starts with Oct. 29, 1675, when Leibniz, in the course of inventing calculus while holed up in a squalid Parisian garret, introduced the integral symbol, the foundation of a notational system that made calculus a facile yet powerful tool for modeling dynamic processes. Other moments find Leibniz contemplating a scheme for uniting Christian denominations, how to invent a mechanical calculator, and his famous assertion that humans live in "the best of all possible worlds." Kempe presents Leibniz as an icon of the early Enlightenment, constantly hatching schemes for technological and administrative progress. For example, in the early 1710s, Leibniz made unsuccessful appeals to his patron, Russian czar Peter the Great, to revamp the country's educational system and fund a Siberian research expedition. Unfortunately, Kempe often struggles to clarify Leibniz's abstruse ideas, especially his metaphysics. (Attempting to explain Leibniz's binary theology, he writes, "God, as the absolute unity , created the world out of the void .... This means that nothing in the world is consummate... but at the same time there is no absolute nothingness, only relative nothingness.") Despite the author's best efforts, this doesn't quite manage to bring Leibniz's esoteric thinking down to earth. Photos. (Nov.)

A distinguished German historian explores the life of the late-17th-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz was easily one of the greatest minds to have emerged from the Enlightenment, yet he is little discussed today. Proceeding from the philosopher's belief in the importance of "constantly changing one's position and taking on a new point of view," Kempe examines Leibniz's life by focusing on seven key days between ages 29 and 70. He carefully reconstructs those days not only to give a sense of Leibniz's world but also to allow readers a glimpse into the restlessness of a man who, at his death, left observations penned on 100,000 pages "of every size imaginable." The story begins in 1675, when Leibniz, then living in Paris, had successfully created the symbolic language associated with infinitesimal calculus. Even as he pondered the workings of his system, his broad-ranging mind was also musing on how symbols could be used to "parse the totality of human knowledge into simple terms." Each of the chapters that follow finds the philosopher a little older and in a new city, drinking coffee and working on an astonishing variety of projects: windmills for mining operations, irrigation systems for noble families, and in-depth political histories of German royal houses. Some of his ideas, like the notion that his binary mathematical system could be used to decipher "the world and its knowledge" appear far-fetched, but they are all part of his enduring faith in progress and what is possible. As well researched as it is readable, this study will appeal not only to scholars of Leibniz and the Enlightenment, but to anyone with an interest in well-articulated, imaginatively crafted intellectual histories. A unique biography about one of the world's most brilliant polymaths. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.