
“Let Us Calculate”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination - benbreen
http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/11/10/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-computational-imagination/
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deusofnull
Amazing work on this. It really strikes me to see a snapshot of the genealogy
of the "technological utopian" viewpoint often seen today. People have
believed that computational reasoning could delivery universal truth for quite
some time now! Also I find it particularly interesting to note the mythical /
religious conviction of these thinkers.

Not sure if Leibniz could have forseen the ethical / moral divergence of
internet culture today, but I'm sure he would have been fascinated & repulsed
by the diatribes of comment sections...

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spynxic
"Leibniz’s interest in this area can be traced back to his 1666 Dissertatio De
Arte Combinatoria — an extended version of his doctoral dissertation in which
he explores what was known as the 'art of combinations'."

Does this refer to the branch of mathematics which is called Combinatorics
today?

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danielmorozoff
Sort of, it has to do with a generalizable philosophy on combining underlying
pieces of thought in order to argue any concept. This was popularized by Ramon
Lull, and discussed in the article. He focused primarily on religion and
conversion to the Christian faith (a primer to answer any question about
god/religion ) for example. It turns out he also had interests in computation
on recently discovered work ~2001

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull)

In the Arte Combinatoria Leibniz basing on these ideas makes forays into
mathematical combinatorics, and did a bunch of unpublished work (Nachlass) in
the area yielding some results that were not published for many years later.
For example partition of n into k published by Euler later.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03150860749...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0315086074900329)

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p4bl0
Funny that this pops here today. I was rereading _Logicomix_ two days ago, and
Leibniz “ _Calculemus!_ ” is mentioned at least two times in the comics.

Anyone who hasn't read _Logicomix_ already should really do it asap.

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breadbox
Martin Gardner published a small book early in his career that describes
Llull's project. It includes reproductions of many of his diagrams, which are
very geometrically ornate.

