Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig, Germany, the son of a professor of moral philosophy. As a boy he taught himself Latin from his late father's library. He earned a doctorate in law at twenty and worked for most of his life as a diplomat, librarian, historian and adviser to German princes, especially the dukes of Hanover. In Paris in the 1670s he studied mathematics and developed calculus, publishing it in 1684; Isaac Newton had worked out similar methods earlier but not published them, and a bitter dispute followed over who deserved credit. The notation Leibniz invented, such as dx and the integral sign, is still used today. He built a calculating machine that could multiply and divide, and he studied binary arithmetic, using only ones and zeros. In philosophy he argued that the world is made of simple substances called monads and that God chose to create the best of all possible worlds. He worked for the reunion of Protestant and Catholic churches and helped found the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He died in Hanover in 1716, largely neglected.

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Faith: Born into a Lutheran family. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy