1716: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz dies

On 14 November 1716, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in Hanover at the age of seventy. A philosopher, mathematician, diplomat and inventor, Leibniz left behind a body of work that quietly shaped the conceptual foundations of computing and artificial intelligence centuries before either field had a name.

Leibniz is remembered for independently inventing the differential and integral calculus, yet his deeper legacy for AI lies elsewhere. He devised a binary number system that represented all quantities with only 0 and 1—an idea he linked to the ancient Chinese I Ching and that later became the bedrock of digital electronics. He also designed mechanical calculating machines capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and speculated about a “calculus ratiocinator”: a universal formal language in which every rational argument could be reduced to computation. Disputes, he hoped, would end with the invitation “Let us calculate.”

These twin ambitions—binary representation and the mechanisation of reasoning—travelled a long road. George Boole’s algebraic logic, Frege’s predicate calculus, Turing’s abstract machines and Shannon’s switching theory all stand downstream of Leibniz’s vision. When modern neural networks encode knowledge as vast arrays of binary weights, or when large language models attempt to turn natural-language questions into chains of formal inference, they are, in a distant sense, answering Leibniz’s call.

Today’s AI systems still wrestle with the limits he foresaw: how to capture meaning in symbols, how to decide which inferences are valid, and how far pure calculation can take us toward genuine understanding. On the anniversary of his death we remember not a single invention but an intellectual temperament—the conviction that thought itself might be made exact, and therefore mechanical—that continues to animate the field.