A man of remarkable breadth of knowledge, he made original contributions to optics, mechanics, statistics, logic, and probability theory. He conceived the idea of calculating machines, and of a universal language. He wrote on history, law, and political theory, and his philosophy was the foundation of 18th-c Rationalism. He died in Hanover two years later, without real recognition and with almost all his work unpublished. That he was slightly contradictory can be seen from the fact that most of what he published while alive was designed to appeal to the Royalty to whom he attached himself, and was reactionary and shallow, and what he left unpublished was more often profound, original and philosophically important.
Monads have no windows by which anything goes in or out.
He seems to have made an impression upon Norbert Wiener His mathematical work was later made use of by Jacques Bernoulli Return to the biography index . Back to my homepage , the school , the Journalism department , or the Underground student pipeline .