Portrait of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by Bernhard Christoph Francke, oil on canvas. Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (1646-1716) was a prominent German polymath and one of the most important logicians, mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Enlightenment. As a representative of the seventeenth-century tradition of rationalism, Leibniz developed, as his most prominent accomplishment, the ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton's contemporaneous developments