Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German polymath who worked as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He was born in Leipzig, enrolled at the University of Leipzig at the age of 14 and received his doctorate in law at the University of Altdorf in 1666. From the end of 1676 until his death he lived mainly in Hanover in the service of the House of Brunswick. Alongside Newton, he is widely credited with the invention of calculus.
For digital electronics, his work on the binary number system (German: Dualsystem) is the most important. Leibniz is credited with devising the modern binary number system, which is the basis of modern communications and digital computing; the English astronomer Thomas Harriot had devised the same system decades earlier. Leibniz documented the system early in his life and returned to it throughout his career. His first known work on the subject, ‘On the Binary Progression’ (1679), introduced the conversion between decimal and binary numbers and algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with binary numbers. His best-known work on the subject is the article ‘Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire’ (‘Explanation of Binary Arithmetic’), dated 1703 and printed in 1705; it describes an arithmetic that uses only the characters 0 and 1. He also articulated logical properties such as conjunction, disjunction and negation, and he noted that the hexagrams of the Chinese book I Ching correspond to the binary numbers from 000000 to 111111.
Leibniz also worked on calculating machines. In 1673 he showed the Royal Society in London an unfinished model of a calculating machine designed to execute all four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), and the society elected him a Fellow. In 1679, while thinking about his binary arithmetic, he imagined a machine in which binary numbers were represented by marbles, which fell through holes that could be opened and closed – an arrangement that has been compared to punched cards.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number
Image source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain, Christoph Bernhard Francke)
