“Let Us Calculate”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination | Hacker News Reader

“Let Us Calculate”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination

publicdomainreview.org

34 pointsbenbreen5 comments

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...

"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?

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

In the Arte Combinatoria Leibniz basing on these ideas makes forays into mathematical combinatorics, and did a bunch of unpublished work (Nachlass) in the area yielding some results that were not published for many years later.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

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.

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.

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