Dropping in on Gottfried Leibniz (2013)

"omnibus ex nihilo ducendis" Everything can be derived from nothing.

A side note, from some discussion of ethnomathematics over the years, many are surprised to hear that one of Leibniz's contributions as a state philosopher was proposing policies such as the "Egyptian Plan" to Louis XIV with addendums bearing titles that speak to a particular world-view.

Example : "A Method to Institute a New, Invincible Militia That Can Subjugate the Entire Earth, Easily Seize Control over Egypt or Establish American Colonies". Essentially he wanted to take remote islands, clear them of their population, inhabit them with what he considered to be "a fine bunch of subhuman beasts" - being people orphaned from their respective regions and raised in military tradition towards perfect subservience to their masters.

You expect Wolframe to make every article he write about himself, but to do so for a man who's been dead for centuries is impressive.

> Across town, however, there’s another commemoration of a sort — an outlet store for cookies that carry the name “Leibniz” in his honor: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2013/05/35-larg...

That's not the whole story: Leibniz was asked once to develop military rations, and suggested to use zwieback (rusk?). That's why Bahlsen named his biscuits "Leibniz Keks". And "keks", which is now a standard word in German for biscuits, is just a phonetic spelling of English "cakes". Interestingly, "keks" is singular, and the plural is "kekse". There was actually a discussion at the beginning of the 20th century (when the word was accepted to enter the Duden dictionary) that the correct singular version should be "kek" (phonetic spelling of "cake").