title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1677, he was promoted, at his request, to Privy Counselor of Justice, a post he held for the rest of his life. Leibniz served three consecutive rulers of the House of Brunswick as historian, political adviser, and most consequentially, as librarian of the ducal library. He thenceforth employed his pen on all the various political, historical, and theological matters involving the House of Brunswick; the resulting documents form a valuable part of the historical record for the period.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz began promoting a project to use windmills to improve the mining operations in the Harz Mountains. This project did little to improve mining operations and was shut down by Duke Ernst August in 1685.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Among the few people in north Germany to accept Leibniz were the Electress Sophia of Hanover (1630–1714), her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover (1668–1705), the Queen of Prussia and his avowed disciple, and Caroline of Ansbach, the consort of her grandson, the future George II. To each of these women he was correspondent, adviser, and friend. In turn, they all approved of Leibniz more than did their spouses and the future king George I of Great Britain.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The population of Hanover was only about 10,000, and its provinciality eventually grated on Leibniz. Nevertheless, to be a major courtier to the House of Brunswick was quite an honor, especially in light of the meteoric rise in the prestige of that House during Leibniz's association with it. In 1692, the Duke of Brunswick became a hereditary Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. The British Act of Settlement 1701 designated the Electress Sophia and her descent as the royal family of England, once both King William III and his sister-in-law and successor, Queen Anne, were dead. Leibniz played a role in the initiatives and negotiations leading up to that Act, but not always an effective one. For example, something he published anonymously in England, thinking to promote the Brunswick cause, was formally censured by the British Parliament.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The Brunswicks tolerated the enormous effort Leibniz devoted to intellectual pursuits unrelated to his duties as a courtier, pursuits such as perfecting calculus, writing about other mathematics, logic, physics, and philosophy, and keeping up a vast correspondence. He began working on calculus in 1674; the earliest evidence of its use in his surviving notebooks is 1675. By 1677 he had a coherent system in hand, but did not publish it until 1684. Leibniz's most important mathematical papers were published between 1682 and 1692, usually in a journal which he and Otto Mencke founded in 1682, the "Acta Eruditorum". That journal played a key role in advancing his mathematical and scientific reputation, which in turn enhanced his eminence in diplomacy, history, theology, and philosophy.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The Elector Ernest Augustus commissioned Leibniz to write a history of the House of Brunswick, going back to the time of Charlemagne or earlier, hoping that the resulting book would advance his dynastic ambitions. From 1687 to 1690, Leibniz traveled extensively in Germany, Austria, and Italy, seeking and finding archival materials bearing on this project. Decades went by but no history appeared; the next Elector became quite annoyed at Leibniz's apparent dilatoriness. Leibniz never finished the project, in part because of his huge output on many other fronts, but also because he insisted on writing a meticulously researched and erudite book based on archival sources, when his patrons would have been quite happy with a short popular book, one perhaps little more than a genealogy with commentary, to be completed in three years or less. They never knew that he had in fact carried out a fair part of his assigned task: when the material Leibniz had written and collected for his history of the House of Brunswick was finally published in the 19th century, it filled three volumes.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1708, John Keill, writing in the journal of the Royal Society and with Newton's presumed blessing, accused Leibniz of having plagiarised Newton's calculus. Thus began the calculus priority dispute which darkened the remainder of Leibniz's life. A formal investigation by the Royal Society (in which Newton was an unacknowledged participant), undertaken in response to Leibniz's demand for a retraction, upheld Keill's charge. Historians of mathematics writing since 1900 or so have tended to acquit Leibniz, pointing to important differences between Leibniz's and Newton's versions of calculus.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1711, while traveling in northern Europe, the Russian Tsar Peter the Great stopped in Hanover and met Leibniz, who then took some interest in Russian matters for the rest of his life. In 1712, Leibniz began a two-year residence in Vienna, where he was appointed Imperial Court Councillor to the Habsburgs. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Elector George Louis became King George I of Great Britain, under the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement. Even though Leibniz had done much to bring about this happy event, it was not to be his hour of glory. Despite the intercession of the Princess of Wales, Caroline of Ansbach, George I forbade Leibniz to join him in London until he completed at least one volume of the history of the Brunswick family his father had commissioned nearly 30 years earlier. Moreover, for George I to include Leibniz in his London court would have been deemed insulting to Newton, who was seen as having won the calculus priority dispute and whose standing in British official circles could not have been higher. Finally, his dear friend and defender, the Dowager Electress Sophia, died in 1714.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz died in Hanover in 1716. At the time, he was so out of favor that neither George I (who happened to be near Hanover at that time) nor any fellow courtier other than his personal secretary attended the funeral. Even though Leibniz was a life member of the Royal Society and the Berlin Academy of Sciences, neither organization saw fit to honor his death. His grave went unmarked for more than 50 years. He was, however, eulogized by Fontenelle, before the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, which had admitted him as a foreign member in 1700. The eulogy was composed at the behest of the Duchess of Orleans, a niece of the Electress Sophia.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz never married. He complained on occasion about money, but the fair sum he left to his sole heir, his sister's stepson, proved that the Brunswicks had, by and large, paid him well. In his diplomatic endeavors, he at times verged on the unscrupulous, as was all too often the case with professional diplomats of his day. On several occasions, Leibniz backdated and altered personal manuscripts, actions which put him in a bad light during the calculus controversy.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: He was charming, well-mannered, and not without humor and imagination. He had many friends and admirers all over Europe. He identified as a Protestant and a philosophical theist. Leibniz remained committed to Trinitarian Christianity throughout his life.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's philosophical thinking appears fragmented, because his philosophical writings consist mainly of a multitude of short pieces: journal articles, manuscripts published long after his death, and many letters to many correspondents. He wrote only two book-length philosophical treatises, of which only the "Théodicée" of 1710 was published in his lifetime.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz dated his beginning as a philosopher to his "Discourse on Metaphysics", which he composed in 1686 as a commentary on a running dispute between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld. This led to an extensive and valuable correspondence with Arnauld; it and the "Discourse" were not published until the 19th century. In 1695, Leibniz made his public entrée into European philosophy with a journal article titled "New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances". Between 1695 and 1705, he composed his "New Essays on Human Understanding", a lengthy commentary on John Locke's 1690 "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", but upon learning of Locke's 1704 death, lost the desire to publish it, so that the "New Essays" were not published until 1765. The "Monadologie", composed in 1714 and published posthumously, consists of 90 aphorisms.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz also wrote a short paper, "Primae veritates" ("First Truths"), first published by Louis Couturat in 1903 (pp. 518–523) summarizing his views on metaphysics. The paper is undated; that he wrote it while in Vienna in 1689 was determined only in 1999, when the ongoing critical edition finally published Leibniz's philosophical writings for the period 1677–90. Couturat's reading of this paper was the launching point for much 20th-century thinking about Leibniz, especially among analytic philosophers. But after a meticulous study of all of Leibniz's philosophical writings up to 1688—a study the 1999 additions to the critical edition made possible—Mercer (2001) begged to differ with Couturat's reading; the jury is still out.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz met Spinoza in 1676, read some of his unpublished writings, and has since been suspected of appropriating some of Spinoza's ideas. While Leibniz admired Spinoza's powerful intellect, he was also forthrightly dismayed by Spinoza's conclusions, especially when these were inconsistent with Christian orthodoxy.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Unlike Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz had a thorough university education in philosophy. He was influenced by his Leipzig professor Jakob Thomasius, who also supervised his BA thesis in philosophy. Leibniz also eagerly read Francisco Suárez, a Spanish Jesuit respected even in Lutheran universities. Leibniz was deeply interested in the new methods and conclusions of Descartes, Huygens, Newton, and Boyle, but viewed their work through a lens heavily tinted by scholastic notions. Yet it remains the case that Leibniz's methods and concerns often anticipate the logic, and analytic and linguistic philosophy of the 20th century.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz would on occasion give a rational defense of a specific principle, but more often took them for granted.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's best known contribution to metaphysics is his theory of monads, as exposited in "Monadologie". He proposes his theory that the universe is made of an infinite number of simple substances known as monads. Monads can also be compared to the corpuscles of the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes and others. These simple substances or monads are the "ultimate units of existence in nature". Monads have no parts but still exist by the qualities that they have. These qualities are continuously changing over time, and each monad is unique. They are also not affected by time and are subject to only creation and annihilation. Monads are centers of force; substance is force, while space, matter, and motion are merely phenomenal. It is said that he anticipated Albert Einstein by arguing, against Newton, that space, time, and motion are completely relative as he quipped, "As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is, that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions." Einstein, who called himself a "Leibnizian" even wrote in the introduction to Max Jammer's book "Concepts of Space" that Leibnizianism was superior to Newtonianism, and his ideas would have dominated over Newton's had it not been for the poor technological tools of the time; it has been argued that Leibniz paved the way for Einstein's theory of relativity.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's proof of God can be summarized in the "Théodicée". Reason is governed by the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. Using the principle of reasoning, Leibniz concluded that the first reason of all things is God. All that we see and experience is subject to change, and the fact that this world is contingent can be explained by the possibility of the world being arranged differently in space and time. The contingent world must have some necessary reason for its existence. Leibniz uses a geometry book as an example to explain his reasoning. If this book was copied from an infinite chain of copies, there must be some reason for the content of the book. Leibniz concluded that there must be the ""monas monadum"" or God.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The ontological essence of a monad is its irreducible simplicity. Unlike atoms, monads possess no material or spatial character. They also differ from atoms by their complete mutual independence, so that interactions among monads are only apparent. Instead, by virtue of the principle of pre-established harmony, each monad follows a pre-programmed set of "instructions" peculiar to itself, so that a monad "knows" what to do at each moment. By virtue of these intrinsic instructions, each monad is like a little mirror of the universe. Monads need not be "small"; e.g., each human being constitutes a monad, in which case free will is problematic.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The "Theodicy" tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. It must be the best possible and most balanced world, because it was created by an all powerful and all knowing God, who would not choose to create an imperfect world if a better world could be known to him or possible to exist. In effect, apparent flaws that can be identified in this world must exist in every possible world, because otherwise God would have chosen to create the world that excluded those flaws.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz asserted that the truths of theology (religion) and philosophy cannot contradict each other, since reason and faith are both "gifts of God" so that their conflict would imply God contending against himself. The "Theodicy" is Leibniz's attempt to reconcile his personal philosophical system with his interpretation of the tenets of Christianity. This project was motivated in part by Leibniz's belief, shared by many philosophers and theologians during the Enlightenment, in the rational and enlightened nature of the Christian religion. It was also shaped by Leibniz's belief in the perfectibility of human nature (if humanity relied on correct philosophy and religion as a guide), and by his belief that metaphysical necessity must have a rational or logical foundation, even if this metaphysical causality seemed inexplicable in terms of physical necessity (the natural laws identified by science).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Because reason and faith must be entirely reconciled, any tenet of faith which could not be defended by reason must be rejected. Leibniz then approached one of the central criticisms of Christian theism: if God is all good, all wise, and all powerful, then how did evil come into the world? The answer (according to Leibniz) is that, while God is indeed unlimited in wisdom and power, his human creations, as creations, are limited both in their wisdom and in their will (power to act). This predisposes humans to false beliefs, wrong decisions, and ineffective actions in the exercise of their free will. God does not arbitrarily inflict pain and suffering on humans; rather he permits both "moral evil" (sin) and "physical evil" (pain and suffering) as the necessary consequences of "metaphysical evil" (imperfection), as a means by which humans can identify and correct their erroneous decisions, and as a contrast to true good.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Further, although human actions flow from prior causes that ultimately arise in God and therefore are known to God as metaphysical certainties, an individual's free will is exercised within natural laws, where choices are merely contingently necessary and to be decided in the event by a "wonderful spontaneity" that provides individuals with an escape from rigorous predestination.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: For Leibniz, "God is an absolutely perfect being". He describes this perfection later in section VI as the simplest form of something with the most substantial outcome (VI). Along these lines, he declares that every type of perfection "pertains to him (God) in the highest degree" (I). Even though his types of perfections are not specifically drawn out, Leibniz highlights the one thing that, to him, does certify imperfections and proves that God is perfect: "that one acts imperfectly if he acts with less perfection than he is capable of", and since God is a perfect being, he cannot act imperfectly (III). Because God cannot act imperfectly, the decisions he makes pertaining to the world must be perfect. Leibniz also comforts readers, stating that because he has done everything to the most perfect degree; those who love him cannot be injured. However, to love God is a subject of difficulty as Leibniz believes that we are "not disposed to wish for that which God desires" because we have the ability to alter our disposition (IV). In accordance with this, many act as rebels, but Leibniz says that the only way we can truly love God is by being content "with all that comes to us according to his will" (IV).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Because God is "an absolutely perfect being" (I), Leibniz argues that God would be acting imperfectly if he acted with any less perfection than what he is able of (III). His syllogism then ends with the statement that God has made the world perfectly in all ways. This also affects how we should view God and his will. Leibniz states that, in lieu of God's will, we have to understand that God "is the best of all masters" and he will know when his good succeeds, so we, therefore, must act in conformity to his good will—or as much of it as we understand (IV). In our view of God, Leibniz declares that we cannot admire the work solely because of the maker, lest we mar the glory and love God in doing so. Instead, we must admire the maker for the work he has done (II). Effectively, Leibniz states that if we say the earth is good because of the will of God, and not good according to some standards of goodness, then how can we praise God for what he has done if contrary actions are also praiseworthy by this definition (II). Leibniz then asserts that different principles and geometry cannot simply be from the will of God, but must follow from his understanding.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz wrote: "Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason ... is found in a substance which ... is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself." Martin Heidegger called this question "the fundamental question of metaphysics".


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz believed that much of human reasoning could be reduced to calculations of a sort, and that such calculations could resolve many differences of opinion:


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator, which resembles symbolic logic, can be viewed as a way of making such calculations feasible. Leibniz wrote memoranda that can now be read as groping attempts to get symbolic logic—and thus his "calculus"—off the ground. These writings remained unpublished until the appearance of a selection edited by Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (1859). Louis Couturat published a selection in 1901; by this time the main developments of modern logic had been created by Charles Sanders Peirce and by Gottlob Frege.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz thought symbols were important for human understanding. He attached so much importance to the development of good notations that he attributed all his discoveries in mathematics to this. His notation for calculus is an example of his skill in this regard. Leibniz's passion for symbols and notation, as well as his belief that these are essential to a well-running logic and mathematics, made him a precursor of semiotics.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: But Leibniz took his speculations much further. Defining a character as any written sign, he then defined a "real" character as one that represents an idea directly and not simply as the word embodying the idea. Some real characters, such as the notation of logic, serve only to facilitate reasoning. Many characters well known in his day, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, and the symbols of astronomy and chemistry, he deemed not real. Instead, he proposed the creation of a "characteristica universalis" or "universal characteristic", built on an alphabet of human thought in which each fundamental concept would be represented by a unique "real" character:


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Complex thoughts would be represented by combining characters for simpler thoughts. Leibniz saw that the uniqueness of prime factorization suggests a central role for prime numbers in the universal characteristic, a striking anticipation of Gödel numbering. Granted, there is no intuitive or mnemonic way to number any set of elementary concepts using the prime numbers.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Because Leibniz was a mathematical novice when he first wrote about the "characteristic", at first he did not conceive it as an algebra but rather as a universal language or script. Only in 1676 did he conceive of a kind of "algebra of thought", modeled on and including conventional algebra and its notation. The resulting "characteristic" included a logical calculus, some combinatorics, algebra, his "analysis situs" (geometry of situation), a universal concept language, and more. What Leibniz actually intended by his "characteristica universalis" and calculus ratiocinator, and the extent to which modern formal logic does justice to calculus, may never be established. Leibniz's idea of reasoning through a universal language of symbols and calculations remarkably foreshadows great 20th-century developments in formal systems, such as Turing completeness, where computation was used to define equivalent universal languages (see Turing degree).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz has been noted as one of the most important logicians between the times of Aristotle and Gottlob Frege. Leibniz enunciated the principal properties of what we now call conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, set inclusion, and the empty set. The principles of Leibniz's logic and, arguably, of his whole philosophy, reduce to two:


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The formal logic that emerged early in the 20th century also requires, at minimum, unary negation and quantified variables ranging over some universe of discourse.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz published nothing on formal logic in his lifetime; most of what he wrote on the subject consists of working drafts. In his "History of Western Philosophy", Bertrand Russell went so far as to claim that Leibniz had developed logic in his unpublished writings to a level which was reached only 200 years later.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Russell's principal work on Leibniz found that many of Leibniz's most startling philosophical ideas and claims (e.g., that each of the fundamental monads mirrors the whole universe) follow logically from Leibniz's conscious choice to reject "relations" between things as unreal. He regarded such relations as (real) "qualities" of things (Leibniz admitted unary predicates only): For him, "Mary is the mother of John" describes separate qualities of Mary and of John. This view contrasts with the relational logic of De Morgan, Peirce, Schröder and Russell himself, now standard in predicate logic. Notably, Leibniz also declared space and time to be inherently relational.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's 1690 discovery of his algebra of concepts (deductively equivalent to the Boolean algebra) and the associated metaphysics, are of interest in present-day computational metaphysics.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Although the mathematical notion of function was implicit in trigonometric and logarithmic tables, which existed in his day, Leibniz was the first, in 1692 and 1694, to employ it explicitly, to denote any of several geometric concepts derived from a curve, such as abscissa, ordinate, tangent, chord, and the perpendicular (see History of the function concept). In the 18th century, "function" lost these geometrical associations. Leibniz also believed that the sum of an infinite number of zeros would be equal to one half using the analogy of the creation of the world from nothing. Leibniz was also one of the pioneers in actuarial science, calculating the purchase price of life annuities and the liquidation of a state's debt.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's research into formal logic, also relevant to mathematics, is discussed in the preceding section. The best overview of Leibniz's writings on calculus may be found in Bos (1974).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz, who invented one of the earliest mechanical calculators, said of calculation: "For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used."


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz arranged the coefficients of a system of linear equations into an array, now called a matrix, in order to find a solution to the system if it existed. This method was later called Gaussian elimination. Leibniz laid down the foundations and theory of determinants, although the Japanese mathematician Seki Takakazu also discovered determinants independently of Leibniz. His works show calculating the determinants using cofactors. Calculating the determinant using cofactors is named the Leibniz formula. Finding the determinant of a matrix using this method proves impractical with large "n", requiring to calculate "n!" products and the number of n-permutations. He also solved systems of linear equations using determinants, which is now called Cramer's rule. This method for solving systems of linear equations based on determinants was found in 1684 by Leibniz (Cramer published his findings in 1750). Although Gaussian elimination requires formula_1 arithmetic operations, linear algebra textbooks still teach cofactor expansion before LU factorization.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz wrote that circles "can most simply be expressed by this series, that is, the aggregate of fractions alternately added and subtracted". However this formula is only accurate with a large number of terms, using 10,000,000 terms to obtain the correct value of to 8 decimal places. Leibniz attempted to create a definition for a straight line while attempting to prove the parallel postulate. While most mathematicians defined a straight line as the shortest line between two points, Leibniz believed that this was merely a property of a straight line rather than the definition.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with the discovery of calculus (differential and integral calculus). According to Leibniz's notebooks, a critical breakthrough occurred on 11 November 1675, when he employed integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of a function . He introduced several notations used to this day, for instance the integral sign , representing an elongated S, from the Latin word "summa", and the used for differentials, from the Latin word "differentia". Leibniz did not publish anything about his calculus until 1684. Leibniz expressed the inverse relation of integration and differentiation, later called the fundamental theorem of calculus, by means of a figure in his 1693 paper "Supplementum geometriae dimensoriae...". However, James Gregory is credited for the theorem's discovery in geometric form, Isaac Barrow proved a more generalized geometric version, and Newton developed supporting theory. The concept became more transparent as developed through Leibniz's formalism and new notation. The product rule of differential calculus is still called "Leibniz's law". In addition, the theorem that tells how and when to differentiate under the integral sign is called the Leibniz integral rule.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz exploited infinitesimals in developing calculus, manipulating them in ways suggesting that they had paradoxical algebraic properties. George Berkeley, in a tract called "The Analyst" and also in "De Motu", criticized these. A recent study argues that Leibnizian calculus was free of contradictions, and was better grounded than Berkeley's empiricist criticisms.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: From 1711 until his death, Leibniz was engaged in a dispute with John Keill, Newton and others, over whether Leibniz had invented calculus independently of Newton.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The use of infinitesimals in mathematics was frowned upon by followers of Karl Weierstrass, but survived in science and engineering, and even in rigorous mathematics, via the fundamental computational device known as the differential. Beginning in 1960, Abraham Robinson worked out a rigorous foundation for Leibniz's infinitesimals, using model theory, in the context of a field of hyperreal numbers. The resulting non-standard analysis can be seen as a belated vindication of Leibniz's mathematical reasoning. Robinson's transfer principle is a mathematical implementation of Leibniz's heuristic law of continuity, while the standard part function implements the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz was the first to use the term "analysis situs", later used in the 19th century to refer to what is now known as topology. There are two takes on this situation. On the one hand, Mates, citing a 1954 paper in German by Jacob Freudenthal, argues:


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Thus the fractal geometry promoted by Mandelbrot drew on Leibniz's notions of self-similarity and the principle of continuity: "Natura non facit saltus". We also see that when Leibniz wrote, in a metaphysical vein, that "the straight line is a curve, any part of which is similar to the whole", he was anticipating topology by more than two centuries. As for "packing", Leibniz told his friend and correspondent Des Bosses to imagine a circle, then to inscribe within it three congruent circles with maximum radius; the latter smaller circles could be filled with three even smaller circles by the same procedure. This process can be continued infinitely, from which arises a good idea of self-similarity. Leibniz's improvement of Euclid's axiom contains the same concept.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's writings are currently discussed, not only for their anticipations and possible discoveries not yet recognized, but as ways of advancing present knowledge. Much of his writing on physics is included in Gerhardt's "Mathematical Writings".


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz contributed a fair amount to the statics and dynamics emerging around him, often disagreeing with Descartes and Newton. He devised a new theory of motion (dynamics) based on kinetic energy and potential energy, which posited space as relative, whereas Newton was thoroughly convinced that space was absolute. An important example of Leibniz's mature physical thinking is his "Specimen Dynamicum" of 1695.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Until the discovery of subatomic particles and the quantum mechanics governing them, many of Leibniz's speculative ideas about aspects of nature not reducible to statics and dynamics made little sense. For instance, he anticipated Albert Einstein by arguing, against Newton, that space, time and motion are relative, not absolute: "As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is, that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions."


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz held a relationist notion of space and time, against Newton's substantivalist views. According to Newton's substantivalism, space and time are entities in their own right, existing independently of things. Leibniz's relationism, in contrast, describes space and time as systems of relations that exist between objects. The rise of general relativity and subsequent work in the history of physics has put Leibniz's stance in a more favorable light.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: One of Leibniz's projects was to recast Newton's theory as a vortex theory. However, his project went beyond vortex theory, since at its heart there was an attempt to explain one of the most difficult problems in physics, that of the origin of the cohesion of matter.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The principle of sufficient reason has been invoked in recent cosmology, and his identity of indiscernibles in quantum mechanics, a field some even credit him with having anticipated in some sense. In addition to his theories about the nature of reality, Leibniz's contributions to the development of calculus have also had a major impact on physics.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's "vis viva" (Latin for "living force") is , twice the modern kinetic energy. He realized that the total energy would be conserved in certain mechanical systems, so he considered it an innate motive characteristic of matter. Here too his thinking gave rise to another regrettable nationalistic dispute. His "vis viva" was seen as rivaling the conservation of momentum championed by Newton in England and by Descartes and Voltaire in France; hence academics in those countries tended to neglect Leibniz's idea. Leibniz knew of the validity of conservation of momentum. In reality, both energy and momentum are conserved, so both approaches are valid.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: By proposing that the earth has a molten core, he anticipated modern geology. In embryology, he was a preformationist, but also proposed that organisms are the outcome of a combination of an infinite number of possible microstructures and of their powers. In the life sciences and paleontology, he revealed an amazing transformist intuition, fueled by his study of comparative anatomy and fossils. One of his principal works on this subject, "Protogaea", unpublished in his lifetime, has recently been published in English for the first time. He worked out a primal organismic theory. In medicine, he exhorted the physicians of his time—with some results—to ground their theories in detailed comparative observations and verified experiments, and to distinguish firmly scientific and metaphysical points of view.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Psychology had been a central interest of Leibniz. He appears to be an "underappreciated pioneer of psychology" He wrote on topics which are now regarded as fields of psychology: attention and consciousness, memory, learning (association), motivation (the act of "striving"), emergent individuality, the general dynamics of development (evolutionary psychology). His discussions in the "New Essays" and "Monadology" often rely on everyday observations such as the behaviour of a dog or the noise of the sea, and he develops intuitive analogies (the synchronous running of clocks or the balance spring of a clock). He also devised postulates and principles that apply to psychology: the continuum of the unnoticed "petites perceptions" to the distinct, self-aware apperception, and psychophysical parallelism from the point of view of causality and of purpose: "Souls act according to the laws of final causes, through aspirations, ends and means. Bodies act according to the laws of efficient causes, i.e. the laws of motion. And these two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, harmonize with one another." This idea refers to the mind-body problem, stating that the mind and brain do not act upon each other, but act alongside each other separately but in harmony. Leibniz, however, did not use the term "psychologia".


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's epistemological position—against John Locke and English empiricism (sensualism)—was made clear: "Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectu ipse." – "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself." Principles that are not present in sensory impressions can be recognised in human perception and consciousness: logical inferences, categories of thought, the principle of causality and the principle of purpose (teleology).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz found his most important interpreter in Wilhelm Wundt, founder of psychology as a discipline. Wundt used the "… nisi intellectu ipse" quotation 1862 on the title page of his "Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung" (Contributions on the Theory of Sensory Perception) and published a detailed and aspiring monograph on Leibniz. Wundt shaped the term apperception, introduced by Leibniz, into an experimental psychologically based apperception psychology that included neuropsychological modelling – an excellent example of how a concept created by a great philosopher could stimulate a psychological research program. One principle in the thinking of Leibniz played a fundamental role: "the principle of equality of separate but corresponding viewpoints." Wundt characterized this style of thought (perspectivism) in a way that also applied for him—viewpoints that "supplement one another, while also being able to appear as opposites that only resolve themselves when considered more deeply."


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Much of Leibniz's work went on to have a great impact on the field of psychology. Leibniz thought that there are many petites perceptions, or small perceptions of which we perceive but of which we are unaware. He believed that by the principle that phenomena found in nature were continuous by default, it was likely that the transition between conscious and unconscious states had intermediary steps. For this to be true, there must also be a portion of the mind of which we are unaware at any given time. His theory regarding consciousness in relation to the principle of continuity can be seen as an early theory regarding the stages of sleep. In this way, Leibniz's theory of perception can be viewed as one of many theories leading up to the idea of the unconscious. Leibniz was a direct influence on Ernst Platner, who is credited with originally coining the term Unbewußtseyn (unconscious). Additionally, the idea of subliminal stimuli can be traced back to his theory of small perceptions. Leibniz's ideas regarding music and tonal perception went on to influence the laboratory studies of Wilhelm Wundt.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In public health, he advocated establishing a medical administrative authority, with powers over epidemiology and veterinary medicine. He worked to set up a coherent medical training program, oriented towards public health and preventive measures. In economic policy, he proposed tax reforms and a national insurance program, and discussed the balance of trade. He even proposed something akin to what much later emerged as game theory. In sociology he laid the ground for communication theory.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1906, Garland published a volume of Leibniz's writings bearing on his many practical inventions and engineering work. To date, few of these writings have been translated into English. Nevertheless, it is well understood that Leibniz was a serious inventor, engineer, and applied scientist, with great respect for practical life. Following the motto "theoria cum praxi", he urged that theory be combined with practical application, and thus has been claimed as the father of applied science. He designed wind-driven propellers and water pumps, mining machines to extract ore, hydraulic presses, lamps, submarines, clocks, etc. With Denis Papin, he created a steam engine. He even proposed a method for desalinating water. From 1680 to 1685, he struggled to overcome the chronic flooding that afflicted the ducal silver mines in the Harz Mountains, but did not succeed.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz may have been the first computer scientist and information theorist. Early in life, he documented the binary numeral system (base 2), then revisited that system throughout his career. While Leibniz was examining other cultures to compare his metaphysical views, he encountered an ancient Chinese book "I Ching". Leibniz interpreted a diagram which showed yin and yang and corresponded it to a zero and one. More information can be found in the Sinophile section. Leibniz may have plagiarized Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz and Thomas Harriot, who independently developed the binary system, as he was familiar with their works on the binary system. Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz worked extensively on logarithms including logarithms with base 2. Thomas Harriot's manuscripts contained a table of binary numbers and their notation, which demonstrated that any number could be written on a base 2 system. Regardless, Leibniz simplified the binary system and articulated logical properties such as conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, inclusion, and the empty set. He anticipated Lagrangian interpolation and algorithmic information theory. His calculus ratiocinator anticipated aspects of the universal Turing machine. In 1961, Norbert Wiener suggested that Leibniz should be considered the patron saint of cybernetics. Wiener is quoted with "Indeed, the general idea of a computing machine is nothing but a mechanization of Leibniz's Calculus Ratiocinator."


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1671, Leibniz began to invent a machine that could execute all four arithmetic operations, gradually improving it over a number of years. This "stepped reckoner" attracted fair attention and was the basis of his election to the Royal Society in 1673. A number of such machines were made during his years in Hanover by a craftsman working under his supervision. They were not an unambiguous success because they did not fully mechanize the carry operation. Couturat reported finding an unpublished note by Leibniz, dated 1674, describing a machine capable of performing some algebraic operations. Leibniz also devised a (now reproduced) cipher machine, recovered by Nicholas Rescher in 2010. In 1693, Leibniz described a design of a machine which could, in theory, integrate differential equations, which he called "integraph".


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz was groping towards hardware and software concepts worked out much later by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. In 1679, while mulling over his binary arithmetic, Leibniz imagined a machine in which binary numbers were represented by marbles, governed by a rudimentary sort of punched cards. Modern electronic digital computers replace Leibniz's marbles moving by gravity with shift registers, voltage gradients, and pulses of electrons, but otherwise they run roughly as Leibniz envisioned in 1679.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Later in Leibniz's career (after the death of von Boyneburg), Leibniz moved to Paris and accepted a position as a librarian in the Hanoverian court of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg. Leibniz's predecessor, Tobias Fleischer, had already created a cataloging system for the Duke's library but it was a clumsy attempt. At this library, Leibniz focused more on advancing the library than on the cataloging. For instance, within a month of taking the new position, he developed a comprehensive plan to expand the library. He was one of the first to consider developing a core collection for a library and felt "that a library for display and ostentation is a luxury and indeed superfluous, but a well-stocked and organized library is important and useful for all areas of human endeavor and is to be regarded on the same level as schools and churches". Unfortunately, Leibniz lacked the funds to develop the library in this manner. After working at this library, by the end of 1690 Leibniz was appointed as privy-councilor and librarian of the Bibliotheca Augusta at Wolfenbüttel. It was an extensive library with at least 25,946 printed volumes. At this library, Leibniz sought to improve the catalog. He was not allowed to make complete changes to the existing closed catalog, but was allowed to improve upon it so he started on that task immediately. He created an alphabetical author catalog and had also created other cataloging methods that were not implemented. While serving as librarian of the ducal libraries in Hanover and Wolfenbüttel, Leibniz effectively became one of the founders of library science. Seemingly, Leibniz paid a good deal of attention to the classification of subject matter, favoring a well-balance library covering a host of numerous subjects and interests. Leibniz, for example, proposed the following classification system in the Otivm Hanoveranvm Sive Miscellanea (1737).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: He also designed a book indexing system in ignorance of the only other such system then extant, that of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He also called on publishers to distribute abstracts of all new titles they produced each year, in a standard form that would facilitate indexing. He hoped that this abstracting project would eventually include everything printed from his day back to Gutenberg. Neither proposal met with success at the time, but something like them became standard practice among English language publishers during the 20th century, under the aegis of the Library of Congress and the British Library.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: He called for the creation of an empirical database as a way to further all sciences. His "characteristica universalis", calculus ratiocinator, and a "community of minds"—intended, among other things, to bring political and religious unity to Europe—can be seen as distant unwitting anticipations of artificial languages (e.g., Esperanto and its rivals), symbolic logic, even the World Wide Web.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz emphasized that research was a collaborative endeavor. Hence he warmly advocated the formation of national scientific societies along the lines of the British Royal Society and the French Académie Royale des Sciences. More specifically, in his correspondence and travels he urged the creation of such societies in Dresden, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin. Only one such project came to fruition; in 1700, the Berlin Academy of Sciences was created. Leibniz drew up its first statutes, and served as its first President for the remainder of his life. That Academy evolved into the German Academy of Sciences, the publisher of the ongoing critical edition of his works.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's writings on law, ethics, and politics were long overlooked by English-speaking scholars, but this has changed of late.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: While Leibniz was no apologist for absolute monarchy like Hobbes, or for tyranny in any form, neither did he echo the political and constitutional views of his contemporary John Locke, views invoked in support of liberalism, in 18th-century America and later elsewhere. The following excerpt from a 1695 letter to Baron J. C. Boyneburg's son Philipp is very revealing of Leibniz's political sentiments:


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1677, Leibniz called for a European confederation, governed by a council or senate, whose members would represent entire nations and would be free to vote their consciences; this is sometimes considered an anticipation of the European Union. He believed that Europe would adopt a uniform religion. He reiterated these proposals in 1715.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: But at the same time, he arrived to propose an interreligious and multicultural project to create a universal system of justice, which required from him a broad interdisciplinary perspective. In order to propose it, he combined linguistics (especially sinology), moral and legal philosophy, management, economics, and politics.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz trained as a legal academic, but under the tutelage of Cartesian-sympathiser Erhard Weigel we already see an attempt to solve legal problems by rationalist mathematical methods (Weigel’s influence being most explicit in the Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum (An Essay of Collected Philosophical Problems of Right)). For example, the Inaugural Disputation on Perplexing Cases uses early combinatorics to solve some legal disputes, while the 1666 Dissertation on the Combinatorial Art includes simple legal problems by way of illustration.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The use of combinatorial methods to solve legal and moral problems seems, via Athanasius Kircher and Daniel Schwenter to be of Llullist inspiration: Ramón Llull attempted to solve ecumenical disputes through recourse to a combinatorial mode of reasoning he regarded as universal (a mathesis universalis).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In the late 1660s the enlightened Prince-Bishop of Mainz Johann Philipp von Schönborn announced a review of the legal system and made available a position to support his current law commissioner. Leibniz left Franconia and made for Mainz before even winning the role. On reaching Frankfurt am Main Leibniz penned The New Method of Teaching and Learning the Law, by way of application. The text proposed a reform of legal education and is characteristically syncretic, integrating aspects of Thomism, Hobbesianism, Cartesianism and traditional jurisprudence. Leibniz’s argument that the function of legal teaching was not to impress rules as one might train a dog, but to aid the student in discovering their own public reason, evidently impressed von Schönborn as he secured the job.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz’s next major attempt to find a universal rational core to law and so found a legal “science of right”, came when Leibniz worked in Mainz from 1667-72. Starting initially from Hobbes’ mechanistic doctrine of power, Leibniz reverted to logico-combinatorial methods in an attempt to define justice. As Leibniz’s so-called Elementa Juris Naturalis advanced, he built in modal notions of right (possibility) and obligation (necessity) in which we see perhaps the earliest elaboration of his possible worlds doctrine within a deontic frame. While ultimately the Elementa remained unpublished, Leibniz continued to work on his drafts and promote their ideas to correspondents up until his death.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz devoted considerable intellectual and diplomatic effort to what would now be called an ecumenical endeavor, seeking to reconcile the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. In this respect, he followed the example of his early patrons, Baron von Boyneburg and the Duke John Frederickboth cradle Lutherans who converted to Catholicism as adultswho did what they could to encourage the reunion of the two faiths, and who warmly welcomed such endeavors by others. (The House of Brunswick remained Lutheran, because the Duke's children did not follow their father.) These efforts included corresponding with French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and involved Leibniz in some theological controversy. He evidently thought that the thoroughgoing application of reason would suffice to heal the breach caused by the Reformation.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz the philologist was an avid student of languages, eagerly latching on to any information about vocabulary and grammar that came his way. He refuted the belief, widely held by Christian scholars of the time, that Hebrew was the primeval language of the human race. He also refuted the argument, advanced by Swedish scholars in his day, that a form of proto-Swedish was the ancestor of the Germanic languages. He puzzled over the origins of the Slavic languages and was fascinated by classical Chinese. Leibniz was also an expert in the Sanskrit language.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: He published the "princeps editio" (first modern edition) of the late medieval "Chronicon Holtzatiae", a Latin chronicle of the County of Holstein.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz was perhaps the first major European intellectual to take a close interest in Chinese civilization, which he knew by corresponding with, and reading other works by, European Christian missionaries posted in China. He apparently read "Confucius Sinarum Philosophus" in the first year of its publication. He came to the conclusion that Europeans could learn much from the Confucian ethical tradition. He mulled over the possibility that the Chinese characters were an unwitting form of his universal characteristic. He noted how the "I Ching" hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers from 000000 to 111111, and concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in the sort of philosophical mathematics he admired. Leibniz communicated his ideas of the binary system representing Christianity to the Emperor of China, hoping it would convert him. Leibniz was the only major Western philosopher of the time who attempted to accommodate Confucian ideas to prevailing European beliefs.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's attraction to Chinese philosophy originates from his perception that Chinese philosophy was similar to his own. The historian E.R. Hughes suggests that Leibniz's ideas of "simple substance" and "pre-established harmony" were directly influenced by Confucianism, pointing to the fact that they were conceived during the period when he was reading "Confucius Sinarum Philosophus".


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: While making his grand tour of European archives to research the Brunswick family history that he never completed, Leibniz stopped in Vienna between May 1688 and February 1689, where he did much legal and diplomatic work for the Brunswicks. He visited mines, talked with mine engineers, and tried to negotiate export contracts for lead from the ducal mines in the Harz mountains. His proposal that the streets of Vienna be lit with lamps burning rapeseed oil was implemented. During a formal audience with the Austrian Emperor and in subsequent memoranda, he advocated reorganizing the Austrian economy, reforming the coinage of much of central Europe, negotiating a Concordat between the Habsburgs and the Vatican, and creating an imperial research library, official archive, and public insurance fund. He wrote and published an important paper on mechanics.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: When Leibniz died, his reputation was in decline. He was remembered for only one book, the "Théodicée", whose supposed central argument Voltaire lampooned in his popular book "Candide", which concludes with the character Candide saying, ""Non liquet"" (it is not clear), a term that was applied during the Roman Republic to a legal verdict of "not proven". Voltaire's depiction of Leibniz's ideas was so influential that many believed it to be an accurate description. Thus Voltaire and his "Candide" bear some of the blame for the lingering failure to appreciate and understand Leibniz's ideas. Leibniz had an ardent disciple, Christian Wolff, whose dogmatic and facile outlook did Leibniz's reputation much harm. He also influenced David Hume, who read his "Théodicée" and used some of his ideas. In any event, philosophical fashion was moving away from the rationalism and system building of the 17th century, of which Leibniz had been such an ardent proponent. His work on law, diplomacy, and history was seen as of ephemeral interest. The vastness and richness of his correspondence went unrecognized.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Much of Europe came to doubt that Leibniz had discovered calculus independently of Newton, and hence his whole work in mathematics and physics was neglected. Voltaire, an admirer of Newton, also wrote "Candide" at least in part to discredit Leibniz's claim to having discovered calculus and Leibniz's charge that Newton's theory of universal gravitation was incorrect.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz's long march to his present glory began with the 1765 publication of the "Nouveaux Essais", which Kant read closely. In 1768, Louis Dutens edited the first multi-volume edition of Leibniz's writings, followed in the 19th century by a number of editions, including those edited by Erdmann, Foucher de Careil, Gerhardt, Gerland, Klopp, and Mollat. Publication of Leibniz's correspondence with notables such as Antoine Arnauld, Samuel Clarke, Sophia of Hanover, and her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, began.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1900, Bertrand Russell published a critical study of Leibniz's metaphysics. Shortly thereafter, Louis Couturat published an important study of Leibniz, and edited a volume of Leibniz's heretofore unpublished writings, mainly on logic. They made Leibniz somewhat respectable among 20th-century analytical and linguistic philosophers in the English-speaking world (Leibniz had already been of great influence to many Germans such as Bernhard Riemann). For example, Leibniz's phrase "salva veritate", meaning interchangeability without loss of or compromising the truth, recurs in Willard Quine's writings. Nevertheless, the secondary literature on Leibniz did not really blossom until after World War II. This is especially true of English speaking countries; in Gregory Brown's bibliography fewer than 30 of the English language entries were published before 1946. American Leibniz studies owe much to Leroy Loemker (1904–1985) through his translations and his interpretive essays in LeClerc (1973).


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Nicholas Jolley has surmised that Leibniz's reputation as a philosopher is now perhaps higher than at any time since he was alive. Analytic and contemporary philosophy continue to invoke his notions of identity, individuation, and possible worlds. Work in the history of 17th- and 18th-century ideas has revealed more clearly the 17th-century "Intellectual Revolution" that preceded the better-known Industrial and commercial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: In 1985, the German government created the Leibniz Prize, offering an annual award of 1.55 million euros for experimental results and 770,000 euros for theoretical ones. It was the world's largest prize for scientific achievement prior to the Fundamental Physics Prize.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The collection of manuscript papers of Leibniz at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek – Niedersächische Landesbibliothek was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz still receives popular attention. The Google Doodle for 1 July 2018 celebrated Leibniz's 372nd birthday. Using a quill, his hand is shown writing "Google" in binary ASCII code.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: One of the earliest popular but indirect expositions of Leibniz was Voltaire's satire "Candide", published in 1759. Leibniz was lampooned as Professor Pangloss, described as "the greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire".


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz also appears as one of the main historical figures in Neal Stephenson's series of novels "The Baroque Cycle". Stephenson credits readings and discussions concerning Leibniz for inspiring him to write the series.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Leibniz mainly wrote in three languages: scholastic Latin, French and German. During his lifetime, he published many pamphlets and scholarly articles, but only two "philosophical" books, the "Combinatorial Art" and the "Théodicée". (He published numerous pamphlets, often anonymous, on behalf of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, most notably the "De jure suprematum" a major consideration of the nature of sovereignty.) One substantial book appeared posthumously, his "Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain", which Leibniz had withheld from publication after the death of John Locke. Only in 1895, when Bodemann completed his catalogue of Leibniz's manuscripts and correspondence, did the enormous extent of Leibniz's "Nachlass" become clear: about 15,000 letters to more than 1000 recipients plus more than 40,000 other items. Moreover, quite a few of these letters are of essay length. Much of his vast correspondence, especially the letters dated after 1700, remains unpublished, and much of what is published has appeared only in recent decades. The more than 67,000 records of the Leibniz Edition's Catalogue cover almost all of his known writings and the letters from him and to him. The amount, variety, and disorder of Leibniz's writings are a predictable result of a situation he described in a letter as follows:


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: The systematic cataloguing of all of Leibniz's "Nachlass" began in 1901. It was hampered by two world wars and then by decades of German division into two states with the Cold War's "iron curtain" in between, separating scholars, and also scattering portions of his literary estates. The ambitious project has had to deal with writings in seven languages, contained in some 200,000 written and printed pages. In 1985 it was reorganized and included in a joint program of German federal and state ("Länder") academies. Since then the branches in Potsdam, Münster, Hanover and Berlin have jointly published 57 volumes of the critical edition, with an average of 870 pages, and prepared index and concordance works.


title: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

text: Six important collections of English translations are Wiener (1951), Parkinson (1966), Loemker (1969), Ariew and Garber (1989), Woolhouse and Francks (1998), and Strickland (2006). The ongoing critical edition of all of Leibniz's writings is "Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe".


title: Graves' disease

text: Graves' disease (), also known as toxic diffuse goiter, is an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid. It frequently results in and is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism. It also often results in an enlarged thyroid. Signs and symptoms of hyperthyroidism may include irritability, muscle weakness, sleeping problems, a fast heartbeat, poor tolerance of heat, diarrhea and unintentional weight loss. Other symptoms may include thickening of the skin on the shins, known as pretibial myxedema, and eye bulging, a condition caused by Graves' ophthalmopathy. About 25 to 30% of people with the condition develop eye problems.


title: Graves' disease

text: The exact cause of the disease is unclear; however, it is believed to involve a combination of genetic and environmental factors. A person is more likely to be affected if they have a family member with the disease. If one twin is affected, a 30% chance exists that the other twin will also have the disease. The onset of disease may be triggered by physical or emotional stress, infection or giving birth. Those with other autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis are more likely to be affected. Smoking increases the risk of disease and may worsen eye problems. The disorder results from an antibody, called thyroid-stimulating immunoglobulin (TSI), that has a similar effect to thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). These TSI antibodies cause the thyroid gland to produce excess thyroid hormones. The diagnosis may be suspected based on symptoms and confirmed with blood tests and radioiodine uptake. Typically, blood tests show a raised T and T, low TSH, increased radioiodine uptake in all areas of the thyroid and TSI antibodies.


title: Graves' disease

text: The three treatment options are radioiodine therapy, medications, and thyroid surgery. Radioiodine therapy involves taking iodine-131 by mouth, which is then concentrated in the thyroid and destroys it over weeks to months. The resulting hypothyroidism is treated with synthetic thyroid hormones. Medications such as beta blockers may control some of the symptoms, and antithyroid medications such as methimazole may temporarily help people while other treatments are having effect. Surgery to remove the thyroid is another option. Eye problems may require additional treatments.


title: Graves' disease

text: Graves' disease will develop in about 0.5% of males and 3% of females. It occurs about 7.5 times more often in women than in men. Often, it starts between the ages of 40 and 60 but can begin at any age. It is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism in the United States (about 50 to 80% of cases). The condition is named after Irish surgeon Robert Graves, who described it in 1835. A number of prior descriptions also exist.


title: Graves' disease

text: The signs and symptoms of Graves' disease virtually all result from the direct and indirect effects of hyperthyroidism, with main exceptions being Graves' ophthalmopathy, goiter, and pretibial myxedema (which are caused by the autoimmune processes of the disease). Symptoms of the resultant hyperthyroidism are mainly insomnia, hand tremor, hyperactivity, hair loss, excessive sweating, oligomenorrhea, itching, heat intolerance, weight loss despite increased appetite, diarrhea, frequent defecation, palpitations, periodic partial muscle weakness or paralysis in those especially of Asian descent, and skin warmth and moistness. Further signs that may be seen on physical examination are most commonly a diffusely enlarged (usually symmetric), nontender thyroid, lid lag, excessive lacrimation due to Graves' ophthalmopathy, arrhythmias of the heart, such as sinus tachycardia, atrial fibrillation, and premature ventricular contractions, and hypertension.


title: Graves' disease

text: The exact cause is unclear; however, it is believed to involve a combination of genetic and environmental factors. While a theoretical mechanism occurs by which exposure to severe stressors and high levels of subsequent distress such as PTSD (Post traumatic stress disorder) could increase the risk of immune disease and cause an aggravation of the autoimmune response that leads to Graves' disease, more robust clinical data are needed for a firm conclusion.


title: Graves' disease

text: A genetic predisposition for Graves' disease is seen, with some people more prone to develop TSH receptor activating antibodies due to a genetic cause. Human leukocyte antigen DR (especially DR3) appears to play a role. To date, no clear genetic defect has been found to point to a single-gene cause.


title: Graves' disease

text: Genes believed to be involved include those for thyroglobulin, thyrotropin receptor, protein tyrosine phosphatase nonreceptor type 22 (PTPN22), and cytotoxic T-lymphocyte–associated antigen 4, among others.


title: Graves' disease

text: Since Graves' disease is an autoimmune disease which appears suddenly, often later in life, a viral or bacterial infection may trigger antibodies which cross-react with the human TSH receptor, a phenomenon known as antigenic mimicry.


title: Graves' disease

text: The bacterium "Yersinia enterocolitica" bears structural similarity with the human thyrotropin receptor and was hypothesized to contribute to the development of thyroid autoimmunity arising for other reasons in genetically susceptible individuals.


title: Graves' disease

text: Thyroid-stimulating immunoglobulins recognize and bind to the thyrotropin receptor (TSH receptor) which stimulates the secretion of thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3). Thyroxine receptors in the pituitary gland are activated by the surplus hormone, suppressing additional release of TSH in a negative feedback loop. The result is very high levels of circulating thyroid hormones and a low TSH level.


title: Graves' disease

text: Graves' disease is an autoimmune disorder, in which the body produces antibodies that are specific to a self-protein: the receptor for thyroid-stimulating hormone. (Antibodies to thyroglobulin and to the thyroid hormones T3 and T4 may also be produced.)


title: Graves' disease

text: These antibodies cause hyperthyroidism because they bind to the TSHr and chronically stimulate it. The TSHr is expressed on the thyroid follicular cells of the thyroid gland (the cells that produce thyroid hormone), and the result of chronic stimulation is an abnormally high production of T3 and T4. This, in turn, causes the clinical symptoms of hyperthyroidism, and the enlargement of the thyroid gland visible as goiter.


title: Graves' disease

text: The infiltrative exophthalmos frequently encountered has been explained by postulating that the thyroid gland and the extraocular muscles share a common antigen which is recognized by the antibodies. Antibodies binding to the extraocular muscles would cause swelling behind the eyeball.


title: Graves' disease

text: The "orange peel" skin has been explained by the infiltration of antibodies under the skin, causing an inflammatory reaction and subsequent fibrous plaques.


title: Graves' disease

text: Another effect of hyperthyroidism is bone loss from osteoporosis, caused by an increased excretion of calcium and phosphorus in the urine and stool. The effects can be minimized if the hyperthyroidism is treated early. Thyrotoxicosis can also augment calcium levels in the blood by as much as 25%. This can cause stomach upset, excessive urination, and impaired kidney function.


title: Graves' disease

text: Two signs are truly 'diagnostic' of Graves' disease (i.e., not seen in other hyperthyroid conditions): exophthalmos and nonpitting edema (pretibial myxedema). Goiter is an enlarged thyroid gland and is of the diffuse type (i.e., spread throughout the gland). Diffuse goiter may be seen with other causes of hyperthyroidism, although Graves' disease is the most common cause of diffuse goiter. A large goiter will be visible to the naked eye, but a small one (mild enlargement of the gland) may be detectable only by physical examination. Occasionally, goiter is not clinically detectable, but may be seen only with computed tomography or ultrasound examination of the thyroid.


title: Graves' disease

text: Another sign of Graves' disease is hyperthyroidism; that is, overproduction of the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. Normal thyroid levels are also seen, and occasionally also hypothyroidism, which may assist in causing goiter (though it is not the cause of the Graves' disease). Hyperthyroidism in Graves' disease is confirmed, as with any other cause of hyperthyroidism, by measuring elevated blood levels of free (unbound) T3 and T4.


title: Graves' disease

text: Other useful laboratory measurements in Graves' disease include thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH, usually undetectable in Graves' disease due to negative feedback from the elevated T3 and T4), and protein-bound iodine (elevated). Serologically detected thyroid-stimulating antibodies, radioactive iodine (RAI) uptake, or thyroid ultrasound with Doppler all can independently confirm a diagnosis of Graves' disease.


title: Graves' disease

text: Biopsy to obtain histiological testing is not normally required, but may be obtained if thyroidectomy is performed.


title: Graves' disease

text: The goiter in Graves' disease is often not nodular, but thyroid nodules are also common. Differentiating common forms of hyperthyroidism such as Graves' disease, single thyroid adenoma, and toxic multinodular goiter is important to determine proper treatment. The differentiation among these entities has advanced, as imaging and biochemical tests have improved. Measuring TSH-receptor antibodies with the h-TBII assay has been proven efficient and was the most practical approach found in one study.


title: Graves' disease

text: Thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy (TAO), or thyroid eye disease (TED), is the most common extrathyroidal manifestation of Graves' disease. It is a form of idiopathic lymphocytic orbital inflammation, and although its pathogenesis is not completely understood, autoimmune activation of orbital fibroblasts, which in TAO express the TSH receptor, is thought to play a central role.


title: Graves' disease

text: Hypertrophy of the extraocular muscles, adipogenesis, and deposition of nonsulfated glycosaminoglycans and hyaluronate, causes expansion of the orbital fat and muscle compartments, which within the confines of the bony orbit may lead to dysthyroid optic neuropathy, increased intraocular pressures, proptosis, venous congestion leading to chemosis and periorbital edema, and progressive remodeling of the orbital walls. Other distinctive features of TAO include lid retraction, restrictive myopathy, superior limbic keratoconjunctivitis, and exposure keratopathy.


title: Graves' disease

text: Typically the natural history of TAO follows Rundle's curve, which describes a rapid worsening during an initial phase, up to a peak of maximum severity, and then improvement to a static plateau without, however, resolving back to a normal condition.


title: Graves' disease

text: Treatment of Graves' disease includes antithyroid drugs that reduce the production of thyroid hormone, radioiodine (radioactive iodine I-131) and thyroidectomy (surgical excision of the gland). As operating on a hyperthyroid patient is dangerous, prior to thyroidectomy, preoperative treatment with antithyroid drugs is given to render the patient euthyroid. Each of these treatments has advantages and disadvantages, and no single treatment approach is considered the best for everyone.


title: Graves' disease

text: Treatment with antithyroid medications must be administered for six months to two years to be effective. Even then, upon cessation of the drugs, the hyperthyroid state may recur. The risk of recurrence is about 40–50%, and lifelong treatment with antithyroid drugs carries some side effects such as agranulocytosis and liver disease. Side effects of the antithyroid medications include a potentially fatal reduction in the level of white blood cells. Therapy with radioiodine is the most common treatment in the United States, while antithyroid drugs and/or thyroidectomy are used more often in Europe, Japan, and most of the rest of the world.


title: Graves' disease

text: β-Blockers (such as propranolol) may be used to inhibit the sympathetic nervous system symptoms of tachycardia and nausea until antithyroid treatments start to take effect. Pure β-blockers do not inhibit lid retraction in the eyes, which is mediated by alpha adrenergic receptors.


title: Graves' disease

text: The main antithyroid drugs are carbimazole (in the UK), methimazole (in the US), and propylthiouracil/PTU. These drugs block the binding of iodine and coupling of iodotyrosines. The most dangerous side effect is agranulocytosis (1/250, more in PTU). Others include granulocytopenia (dose-dependent, which improves on cessation of the drug) and aplastic anemia. Patients on these medications should see a doctor if they develop sore throat or fever. The most common side effects are rash and peripheral neuritis. These drugs also cross the placenta and are secreted in breast milk. Lugol's iodine may be used to block hormone synthesis before surgery.


title: Graves' disease

text: A randomized control trial testing single-dose treatment for Graves' found methimazole achieved euthyroid state more effectively after 12 weeks than did propylthyouracil (77.1% on methimazole 15 mg vs 19.4% in the propylthiouracil 150 mg groups).


title: Graves' disease

text: No difference in outcome was shown for adding thyroxine to antithyroid medication and continuing thyroxine versus placebo after antithyroid medication withdrawal. However, two markers were found that can help predict the risk of recurrence. These two markers are a positive TSHr antibody (TSHR-Ab) and smoking. A positive TSHR-Ab at the end of antithyroid drug treatment increases the risk of recurrence to 90% (sensitivity 39%, specificity 98%), and a negative TSHR-Ab at the end of antithyroid drug treatment is associated with a 78% chance of remaining in remission. Smoking was shown to have an impact independent to a positive TSHR-Ab.


title: Graves' disease

text: Radioiodine (radioactive iodine-131) was developed in the early 1940s at the Mallinckrodt General Clinical Research Center. This modality is suitable for most patients, although some prefer to use it mainly for older patients. Indications for radioiodine are failed medical therapy or surgery and where medical or surgical therapy are contraindicated. Hypothyroidism may be a complication of this therapy, but may be treated with thyroid hormones if it appears. The rationale for radioactive iodine is that it accumulates in the thyroid and irradiates the gland with its beta and gamma radiations, about 90% of the total radiation being emitted by the beta (electron) particles. The most common method of iodine-131 treatment is to administer a specified amount in microcuries per gram of thyroid gland based on palpation or radiodiagnostic imaging of the gland over 24 hours. Patients who receive the therapy must be monitored regularly with thyroid blood tests to ensure they are treated with thyroid hormone before they become symptomatically hypothyroid.


title: Graves' disease

text: Contraindications to RAI are pregnancy (absolute), ophthalmopathy (relative; it can aggravate thyroid eye disease), or solitary nodules.


title: Graves' disease

text: Disadvantages of this treatment are a high incidence of hypothyroidism (up to 80%) requiring eventual thyroid hormone supplementation in the form of a daily pill(s). The radioiodine treatment acts slowly (over months to years) to destroy the thyroid gland, and Graves' disease–associated hyperthyroidism is not cured in all persons by radioiodine, but has a relapse rate that depends on the dose of radioiodine which is administered. In rare cases, radiation induced thyroiditis has been linked to this treatment.


title: Graves' disease

text: This modality is suitable for young and pregnant people. Indications for thyroidectomy can be separated into absolute indications or relative indications. These indications aid in deciding which people would benefit most from surgery. The absolute indications are a large goiter (especially when compressing the trachea), suspicious nodules or suspected cancer (to pathologically examine the thyroid), and people with ophthalmopathy and additionally if it is the person's preferred method of treatment or if refusing to undergo radioactive iodine treatment. Pregnancy is advised to be delayed for 6 months after radioactive iodine treatment.


title: Graves' disease

text: Both bilateral subtotal thyroidectomy and the Hartley-Dunhill procedure (hemithyroidectomy on one side and partial lobectomy on other side) are possible.


title: Graves' disease

text: Advantages are immediate cure and potential removal of carcinoma. Its risks are injury of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, hypoparathyroidism (due to removal of the parathyroid glands), hematoma (which can be life-threatening if it compresses the trachea), relapse following medical treatment, infections (less common), and scarring. The increase in the risk of nerve injury can be due to the increased vascularity of the thyroid parenchyma and the development of links between the thyroid capsule and the surrounding tissues. Reportedly, a 1% incidence exists of permanent recurrent laryngeal nerve paralysis after complete thyroidectomy. Risks related to anesthesia are many, thus coordination with the anesthesiologist and patient optimization for surgery preoperatively are essential. Removal of the gland enables complete biopsy to be performed to have definite evidence of cancer anywhere in the thyroid. (Needle biopsies are not so accurate at predicting a benign state of the thyroid). No further treatment of the thyroid is required, unless cancer is detected. Radioiodine uptake study may be done after surgery, to ensure all remaining (potentially cancerous) thyroid cells (i.e., near the nerves to the vocal cords) are destroyed. Besides this, the only remaining treatment will be levothyroxine, or thyroid replacement pills to be taken for the rest of the patient's life.


title: Graves' disease

text: A 2013 review article concludes that surgery appears to be the most successful in the management of Graves' disease, with total thyroidectomy being the preferred surgical option.


title: Graves' disease

text: Mild cases are treated with lubricant eye drops or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drops. Severe cases threatening vision (corneal exposure or optic nerve compression) are treated with steroids or orbital decompression. In all cases, cessation of smoking is essential. Double vision can be corrected with prism glasses and surgery (the latter only when the process has been stable for a while).


title: Graves' disease

text: Difficulty closing eyes can be treated with lubricant gel at night, or with tape on the eyes to enable full, deep sleep.


title: Graves' disease

text: Orbital decompression can be performed to enable bulging eyes to retreat back into the head. Bone is removed from the skull behind the eyes, and space is made for the muscles and fatty tissue to fall back into the skull.


title: Graves' disease

text: Eyelid surgery can be performed on upper and/or lower eyelids to reverse the effects of Graves' disease on the eyelids. Eyelid muscles can become tight with Graves' disease, making it impossible to close the eyes all the way. Eyelid surgery involves an incision along the natural crease of the eyelid, and a scraping away of the muscle that holds the eyelid open. This makes the muscle weaker, which allows the eyelid to extend over the eyeball more effectively. Eyelid surgery helps reduce or eliminate dry eye symptoms.


title: Graves' disease

text: For management of clinically active Graves' disease, orbitopathy (clinical activity score >2) with at least mild to moderate severity, intravenous glucocorticoids are the treatment of choice, usually administered in the form of pulse intravenous methylprednisolone. Studies have consistently shown that pulse intravenous methylprednisolone is superior to oral glucocorticoids both in terms of efficacy and decreased side effects for managing Graves' orbitopathy.


title: Graves' disease

text: If left untreated, more serious complications could result, including birth defects in pregnancy, increased risk of a miscarriage, bone mineral loss and, in extreme cases, death. Graves' disease is often accompanied by an increase in heart rate, which may lead to further heart complications, including loss of the normal heart rhythm (atrial fibrillation), which may lead to stroke. If the eyes are proptotic (bulging) enough that the lids do not close completely at night, dryness will occur – with the risk of a secondary corneal infection, which could lead to blindness. Pressure on the optic nerve behind the globe can lead to visual field defects and vision loss, as well. Prolonged untreated hyperthyroidism can lead to bone loss, which may resolve when treated.


title: Graves' disease

text: Graves' disease occurs in about 0.5% of people. Graves' disease data has shown that the lifetime risk for women is around 3% and 0.5% for men. It occurs about 7.5 times more often in women than in men and often starts between the ages of 40 and 60. It is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism in the United States (about 50 to 80% of cases).


title: Graves' disease

text: Graves' disease owes its name to the Irish doctor Robert James Graves, who described a case of goiter with exophthalmos in 1835. (Medical eponyms are often styled nonpossessively; thus "Graves' disease" and "Graves disease" are variant stylings of the same term.)


title: Graves' disease

text: The German Karl Adolph von Basedow independently reported the same constellation of symptoms in 1840. As a result, on the European continent, the terms "Basedow syndrome", "Basedow disease", or "Morbus Basedow" are more common than "Graves' disease".


title: Graves' disease

text: Less commonly, it has been known as Parry disease, Begbie disease, Flajan disease, Flajani–Basedow syndrome, and Marsh disease. These names for the disease were derived from Caleb Hillier Parry, James Begbie, Giuseppe Flajani, and Henry Marsh. Early reports, not widely circulated, of cases of goiter with exophthalmos were published by the Italians Giuseppe Flajani and Antonio Giuseppe Testa, in 1802 and 1810, respectively. Prior to these, Caleb Hillier Parry, a notable provincial physician in England of the late-18th century (and a friend of Edward Miller-Gallus), described a case in 1786. This case was not published until 1825 - ten years ahead of Graves.


title: Graves' disease

text: However, fair credit for the first description of Graves' disease goes to the 12th century Persian physician Sayyid Ismail al-Jurjani, who noted the association of goiter and exophthalmos in his "Thesaurus of the Shah of Khwarazm", the major medical dictionary of its time.


title: Graves' disease

text: Agents that act as antagonists at thyroid stimulating hormone receptors are currently under investigation as a possible treatment for Graves' disease.


title: Moe Howard

text: Moses Harry Horwitz (June 19, 1897 – May 4, 1975), known professionally as Moe Howard, was an American actor and comedian. He is best known as the leader of The Three Stooges, the farce comedy team who starred in motion pictures and television for four decades. That group initially started out as Ted Healy and His Stooges, an act that toured the vaudeville circuit. Moe's distinctive hairstyle came about when he was a boy and cut off his curls with a pair of scissors, producing an irregular shape approximating a bowl cut.


title: Moe Howard

text: Howard was born as Moses Harry Horwitz on June 19, 1897, in the Brooklyn, New York neighborhood of Bensonhurst, the fourth of five sons born to Jennie Gorovitz and Solomon Horwitz. They were of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. He was called Moe as a child and later called himself Harry. His parents and brothers Benjamin ("Jack") and Irving weren't involved in show business, but he, his older brother Shemp Howard, and his younger brother Curly Howard eventually became known as members of the Three Stooges. He loved to read, as his older brother Jack recalled: "I had many Horatio Alger books, and it was Moe's greatest pleasure to read them. They started his imaginative mind working and gave him ideas by the dozen. I think they were instrumental in putting thoughts into his head to become a person of good character and successful." This helped him in his acting career; he could memorize his lines quickly and easily.


title: Moe Howard

text: Howard's "bowl cut" hairstyle became his trademark, despite his mother initially refusing to cut his hair in childhood, letting it grow to shoulder length. He secretly cut his hair in his backyard shed after being frequently teased in school. During one appearance on "The Mike Douglas Show" in the 1970s, he stated, "I used to fight my way to school, in school, and back home from school."


title: Moe Howard

text: Howard developed an interest in acting that caused his grades to worsen and spurred him to play hookey from school: "I used to stand outside the theater knowing the truant officer was looking for me. I would stand there 'til someone came along and ask them to buy my ticket. An adult needed to accompany a juvenile into the theater. When I succeeded, I'd give him my ten cents—that's all it cost—and I'd go up to the top of the balcony where I'd put my chin on the rail and watch, spellbound, from the first act to the last. I would usually select the actor I liked the most and follow his performance throughout the play."


title: Moe Howard

text: Despite his waning attendance, Howard graduated from P.S. 163 in Brooklyn but dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School after only two months, ending his formal education. He took an electric shop course to please his parents but quit after a few months to pursue a career in show business.


title: Moe Howard

text: Howard started off running unpaid errands at the Vitagraph Studios in Midwood, Brooklyn and was rewarded with bit parts in movies in production there, until a 1910 fire destroyed the films done there, and with it, most of Howard's work. Already in 1909, he had met a young man named Ernest Lea Nash (later known as Ted Healy), who was later to provide a significant boost for his career aspirations. In 1912, they both held a summer job working in Annette Kellermann's aquatic act as diving "girls".


title: Moe Howard

text: Howard continued his attempts at gaining show-business experience by singing in a bar with his older brother Shemp until their father put a stop to it, and in 1914, by joining a performing minstrel show troupe on a Mississippi River showboat for the next two summers, with an act they called "Howard and Howard—A Study in Black". At the same time, they worked for a rival vaudeville circuit without makeup.


title: Moe Howard

text: In 1921, he joined Ted Healy in a vaudeville routine. In 1923, Moe saw Shemp in the audience during a theater performance and yelled at him from the stage. Shemp responded by heckling Moe, and the two brothers' amusing bickering during the performance resulted in Healy's immediately hiring Shemp Howard as a permanent part of the act.


title: Moe Howard

text: Moe retired in June 1925 after his marriage to Helen Schonberger and went into real estate with his mother. Meanwhile, Healy's act with frequent stooge Shemp Howard went on to national fame in the Shubert Brothers' "A Night in Spain" (January 1927–November 1928), which had a successful Broadway run, as well as a national tour. During "A Night in Spain", and at the end of a four-month run in Chicago, Illinois, Healy recruited vaudeville violinist Larry Fine to join the troupe in March 1928.


title: Moe Howard

text: After the show ended in late November, Healy signed for the Shuberts' new revue "A Night in Venice" and recruited Moe Howard out of retirement to rejoin the act in December 1928. In rehearsals in early 1929, Howard, Larry Fine, and Shemp Howard came together for the first time as a trio. When "A Night in Venice" closed in March 1930, Healy and the trio toured for a while as "Ted Healy and His Racketeers" (later changed to Ted Healy and His Stooges).


title: Moe Howard

text: Ted Healy and His Stooges were on the verge of hitting the big time and made their first movie, "Soup to Nuts" (1930)—featuring Healy and his four Stooges: Moe (billed as "Harry Howard"), Shemp, Larry, and Fred Sanborn (Sanborn had been with Healy's troupe since January 1929, as one of the stooges in "A Night in Venice")—for Fox Films (later 20th Century Fox). A disagreement with Healy led Moe, Larry, and Shemp to strike out on their own as "Howard, Fine, and Howard," and on August 28, 1930, they premiered that act at L.A.'s Paramount Theatre. Joining the RKO vaudeville circuit, they toured for almost two years, eventually dubbing themselves as "Three Lost Souls" and taking on Jack Walsh as their straight man.


title: Moe Howard

text: In July 1932, Moe, Larry, and Shemp were approached by Healy to rejoin him for the new Shubert Broadway revue "Passing Show of 1932", and the three accepted the offer. On August 16, 1932, during "Passing" rehearsals in New York, Ted walked out on the Shuberts over a contract dispute. On August 19, 1932, Shemp gave his notice, having not seen eye-to-eye with the hard-drinking and sometimes belligerent Healy, and decided to remain with "Passing" which closed in September after pan reviews of its first roadshow performances in Detroit and Cincinnati. Shemp landed at Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn in May 1933, where he stayed for almost four years.


title: Moe Howard

text: On August 20, the day after Shemp's departure, Moe suggested adding his youngest brother Jerome ("Babe" to Moe and Shemp) to the act; contrary to some sources, no search for a replacement was conducted. Healy initially passed on Jerry, but Jerry was so eager to join the act that he shaved off his luxuriant auburn mustache and hair and ran on stage during Healy's routine. That finally got Healy to hire Jerry, who took the stage name Curly. The new lineup of Moe, Larry, and Curly premiered with Ted on stage at Cleveland's RKO Palace on August 27, 1932. Early 1933 during appearances in Los Angeles, Healy and the Stooges were hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as "nut" comics to liven up feature films and short subjects with their antics.


title: Moe Howard

text: After several appearances in several MGM films, Healy was being groomed as a solo character comedian. With Healy pursuing his career in 1934, his Stooges (now renamed "The Three Stooges") signed with Columbia Pictures, where they stayed until December 1957, making 190 comedy shorts.


title: Moe Howard

text: With Healy's departure, Moe assumed Healy's prior role as the aggressive, take-charge leader of the team: a short-tempered bully, prone to slapstick violence against the other two Stooges. Despite his outwardly rather cruel demeanor towards his pals, Moe was also very loyal and protective of the other Stooges on film, keeping them from harm, and, should it befall them, doing whatever it took to save them.


title: Moe Howard

text: He emphasized in his autobiography that the ill-tempered aspects of his on-screen persona did not reflect his real personality. He also boasted of being a shrewd businessman by wisely investing the money made from his film career. Still, the Stooges received no subsequent royalties (i.e., residuals) from any of their many shorts; they were paid a flat amount for each one, and Columbia owned the rights (and profits) thereafter. However, according to Larry Fine, in the 1970s, Columbia allowed the Stooges to do live tours when they were not filming in exchange for a half-salary during those months. Fine indicated that the profits from the tours substantially increased their yearly take.


title: Moe Howard

text: Columbia released its first Three Stooges short, "Woman Haters" (1934), where their stooge characters were not quite fully formed. It was not a Stooge comedy in the classic sense, but rather a romantic farce; Columbia was then making a series of two-reel "Musical Novelties" with the dialogue spoken in rhyme, and the Stooges were recruited to support comedian Marjorie White. Only after the Stooges became established as short-subject stars, the main titles changed to give the Stooges top billing. The version seen on TV and video today is this reissue print.


title: Moe Howard

text: Their next film, "Punch Drunks" (1934), was the only short film written entirely by the Three Stooges, with Curly as a reluctant boxer who goes ballistic every time he hears "Pop Goes the Weasel". Their next short, "Men in Black" (also 1934), a parody of the contemporary hospital drama "Men in White", was their first and only film to be nominated for an Academy Award (with the classic catchphrases "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard" followed by their reiterated unison declaration as young doctors, "For Duty and Humanity!!"). They continued making short films at a steady pace of eight per year, such as "Three Little Pigskins" (also 1934) with a young Lucille Ball, "Pop Goes the Easel" (1935), and "Hoi Polloi" (also 1935), in which two professors make a bet trying to turn the Three Stooges into gentlemen.


title: Moe Howard

text: In the 1940s, the Three Stooges became topical, making several anti-Nazi short films, including "You Nazty Spy!" (1940) Moe's favorite Three Stooges film, "I'll Never Heil Again" (1941), and "They Stooge to Conga" (1943). Moe's impersonation of Adolf Hitler highlighted these shorts, the first of which preceded Charlie Chaplin's film satire "The Great Dictator" by nine months.


title: Moe Howard

text: On May 6, 1946, during the filming of "Half-Wits Holiday" (1947), brother Curly suffered a stroke. He had already suffered a series of them before the filming of "Beer Barrel Polecats" (1946) and was replaced by Shemp, who agreed to return to the group, but only until Curly would be well enough to rejoin. However, Curly appeared in "Hold That Lion!" (1947) in a cameo (the only Three Stooges film to contain all three Howard brothers: Moe, Curly, and Shemp), it was an impromptu setup. He was well enough to participate in a second cameo the next year as a chef in a short scene in "Malice in the Palace", but the footage was never used. Curly suffered a second series of strokes which led to his death at age 48 on January 18, 1952.


title: Moe Howard

text: After Shemp rejoined the act, Moe, Shemp, and Larry shot a television pilot for ABC called "Jerks of All Trades" (1949), apparently intended to lead to a weekly sitcom series on the premise that the Stooges would try a different job or business every week, hoping that eventually one of their attempts would be successful. Anything they tried turned out to be a fiasco, which was the source of the comedy. The pilot took a single day to film and was never aired. It was a kinescope film of three-camera television production, most likely to replicate a proposed live broadcast.


title: Moe Howard

text: B.B. Kahane, Columbia Pictures' vice president of business affairs, stopped the show from being broadcast. Kahane warned the Stooges that a contract stipulation restricted them from performing in a TV series that might compete with their two-reel comedies. Columbia threatened to cancel the boys' contract and take them to court if they tried to sell the series. To avert a legal hassle, the pilot was shelved and the project abandoned. The kinescope film is now in the public domain and widely available.


title: Moe Howard

text: The Three Stooges' series of shorts continued to be popular through the 1950s; Shemp co-starred in 73 comedies. The Stooges also co-starred in a George O'Brien Western, "Gold Raiders" (1951). Moe also co-produced occasional Western and musical films in the 1950s.