from Paris by his nephew Nicolaus Bernoulli. Leibnitz published an anonymous pamphlet Charta volans setting out his side in which a mistake by Newton in his understanding of second and higher derivatives, spotted by Johann Bernoulli, is used as evidence of Leibnitz's case. The argument continued with Keill who published a reply to Charta Volans. Leibnitz refused to carry on the argument with Keill, saying that he could not reply to an idiot. However, when Newton wrote to him directly, Leibnitz did reply and gave a detailed description of his discovery of the differential calculus. From 1715 up until his death Leibnitz corresponded with Samuel Clarke, a supporter of Newton, on time, space, freewill, gravitational attraction across a void and other topics. Leibnitz is described as a man of medium height with a stoop, broad-shouldered but bandy-legged, as capable of thinking for several days sitting in the same chair as of traveling the roads of Europe summer and winter. He was an indefatigable worker, a universal letter writer (he had more than 600 correspondents), a patriot and cosmopolitan, a great scientist, and one of the most powerful spirits of Western civilization. Leibnitz's legacy may have not been quite what he had hoped for. It is ironical that one so devoted to the cause of mutual understanding should have succeeded only in adding to intellectual chauvinism and dogmatism. There is a similar irony in the fact that he was one of the last great polymaths - not in the frivolous sense of having a wide general knowledge, but in the deeper sense of one who is a citizen of the whole world of intellectual inquiry. He deliberately ignored boundaries between disciplines, and lack of qualifications never deterred him from contributing fresh insights to established specialisms. Indeed, one of the reasons why he was so hostile to universities as institutions was because their faculty structure prevented the cross-fertilization of ideas, whi...
