# Celebrates Mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s 372nd Birthday

My favorite mathematician is German Leibniz, who co-invented Calculus with Newton.

Today we thank Leibniz for his elegant Calculus symbols:

$\boxed {\frac{dy}{dx}}$

$\boxed{\int_{0}^{\infty}x^{n}e^{-x}dx}$

Leibniz also invented 01 binary algebra, which he later found it was already in the 3,000-year-old Chinese “Yin-Yang” (阴阳 八卦), so impressed that he recommended to the most powerful western (French) king Louis XIV (14th) to use Chinese as the Universal Language of the world.

The rich Newton sued Leibniz for plagiarism of Calculus, until Leibniz died poor in bankruptcy, buried in a common unknown grave.

The war between Newton & Leibniz extended & lasted 100 years between UK Math Community and Continental Europe Math Community. As a result UK lost its math leadership after Newton, France (Lagrange, Fourier, Cauchy, Galois… ) followed by Germany (Felix Klein, Gauss, Hilbert, Riemann …) took over as the world center of math. After WW2 many German mathematicians (mostly Jewish eg. Noether, Gödel, Artin, …) fled to the USA which is now the Kingdom of Advanced Math.

# Math and Music

If you want your kids to grow up with Math talent, start young in Music, be it playing a simple drum or flute, later then at age 4 or 5 progressing to piano or violin, along the way pick up musical theory…

Notice that great mathematicians (or Physicists the close cousins of Math) are often music talented, but the converse not true! Einstein performed violin with an orchestra formed by a group of Nobel Prize Physicists; never heard Mozart or Langlang (朗朗) or any great musicians proved any Math Conjectures.

Music trains the abstract thinking mind, good for mastering the most abstract subjects like Abstract Algebra or ‘Abstract’ Physics (Quantum Physics).

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1988/11/30/music-math-a-common-equation/?page=1

# Leibniz Universal Language

Universal Language:
[Leibniz’s Essay “On the Universal Science”]

A Universal Language that would reduce ideas to a kind of alphabets of human thought.
These characters to be ‘manipulable representations‘ of ideas.

Leibniz wrote to the French King Louis IV (14th) that the Universal Language is the Chinese ideograms (汉字): as an example below-

The ideogram on the top right is “永” (Yong) in ancient form depicting the picture of a man swimming. The bottom blue ideogram is Water (水), depicting splashing of water droplets.

# De Moivre

De Moivre (1722)

$(Cos A+iSin B)^n = Cos nA + i.Sin \:nA$
– French Protestant, jailed by the Catholic King Louis XIV (14th), exiled to UK.
– Gave Tuition in the Duke home where he met Newton with the newly published book “Principia” and the “New Math” Calculus, he self-paced study to become expert in Calculus.
– He never got a Professor job despite Newton and Leibniz’s help.
– He observed gambling in coffee shops, invented the Game Theory.
– He liked to sleep. One day he declared he would sleep 20 mins more per day. On 73rd day when he accumulated 24 hrs more, he died at 87 yrs old !