Leibniz QCCQ

Quote- "During this entire period Leibniz read, wrote, and thought continually, pursuing ideas with a strength and intensity known to ordinary people only in their pursuit of wealth and power." 

Comment- I chose this quote because of how it lets us know what type of guy Leibniz was. He was always learning something new and doing something new. Even as a child he, "acted for the most part as his own teacher, leading a self-propelled intellectual life even as a small child." He would read a lot, which he seems to have learned a lot from. "He began teaching himself Latin at the age of 8, and soon mastered it sufficiently to read it with ease and compose acceptable Latin verse..." He was constantly learning and teaching himself to do something new. In the reading in page 142 it said, "He had an insatiable appetite for discovering the meaning and purpose of everything around him." In page 147 on the reading it said that he was a librarian, a family historian, an informal minister in charge of scientific and cultural affairs, he was also an engineer, a landscape architect as well as so many other things. He was also into law and philosophy and math and science. It is just amazing that a person can be so many things and be good at almost all of them. For example, it said that he had been called, "the greatest librarian of his age."  He just did so many different things not just math and science.

Connection- This made me think about last week's reading about Newton and how he was the first one to have come up with differential and integral calculus during the two years that universities were closed because of the plague, but he didn't publish his work and therefore at the time it seemed as Leibniz had been the first one because his papers of 1684 and 1686 were the earliest publications on the subject. In the reading, in page 141, it mentions what was mentioned in last week's reading, "The ideas of calculus were "in the air" in the 1650s and 1660s...The last steps putting it all together were taken by two men of great genius working independently of each other: by Isaac Newton in what he called 'the two plague years of 1665 and 1666," and also by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during his sojourn in Paris from 1672 to 1676."

Questions-  Why was it known to people only in their pursuit of wealth and power? What were some major differences between Leibniz and ordinary people of this period? How was it so easy for Leibniz to learn new languages? How was Leibniz calculus different from Newton's? How were they similar? What was specific about each one of them? How was Leibniz able to do so many different things and be good at so many different things?