The binary code running your phone and the calculus used to model its circuits both trace back to one 17th-century German thinker: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This episode follows the man often called the last universal genius, from the seven-year-old given free run of his dead father's library in Leipzig to the isolated philosopher who died in Hanover in 1716 with no obituary from the academies he had helped shape. It is the story of a mind that tried to synthesize all human knowledge and ended up confined by politics and a rival named Isaac Newton.

We trace his early pivot to law as the technology of power in a Europe shattered by the Thirty Years War, his bluff into an alchemical society, his wild proposal that France conquer Egypt, and the trip to Paris where Christiaan Huygens exposed how obsolete his math was. We then cover the stepped ...