Gauss QQC

"...Gauss corrected an error in his father's payroll accounts at the age of 3"

Wow. Genius from a very early age. How could a child so long catch an error in something so mundane? I don't know many 3 year olds that would be going through their father's payroll accounts, let alone correcting them.

"At the age of 18, he made a wonderful geometric discovery that caused him to decide in favor of mathematics and gave him great pleasure until the end of his life."

This is funny because he was interested in something that required a lot of math courses, yet decided against it. Math must have really fascinated Gauss after this discovery for him to make a turnaround so quickly. Why wouldn't he just dive into the math courses he needed in university so he could pursue his desired major? Would mathematics today be even half as far as we are now without Gauss in the field? What would the field of philology be like today if Gauss had stayed in it?

Leibniz QQC

"Leibniz is probably better known to most people as a philosopher than a mathematician."

"No other thinker except Aristotle has rivaled him in the range and variety of his abilities and achievements."

"What manner of man was he, and how did he live, and what did he think?"

"As with most men of really great intellect, Leibniz's formal education was only a minor eddy in the torrent of thought and study and learning that was the essence of his life."

How is it possible to absorb "all the knowledge of his time"? Was there really not that much knowledge going around back in the 17th century?

Was this not the time of being accused of heresy over even the slightest tampering with religion? How did the church approve of his ideas on Christianity and Protestant views?

The fact that an 8-year-old learned Latin and German on his own makes me feel inadequate as a person. Actually, the fact that Leibniz just kept learning from birth to death makes me feel inadequate as a person.

I guess it makes sense that in that day and age a man who knew little of math would be disregarded as a thinker simply because math was such a huge thing back then. Knowing a lot about everything but math would probably only amount to 65% of the total knowledge on the planet at that time.

Leibniz really was a man of many, many, many talents. Not only that, he was good at pretty much everything he did.

I think it's funny that there's a huge "Leibniz vs. Netwon" rivalry. It's like the "band vs. band" or "overly large UFC fighter vs. overly large UFC fighter" rivalries of today. Strange how interests have changed so drastically from the 17th century.