As a philosopher, he was a leading representative of 17th-century rationalism and idealism. As a mathematician, his major achievement was the development of the main ideas of differential and integral calculus, independently of Isaac Newton's contemporaneous developments. Extract of page 469. Mathematicians have consistently favored Leibniz's notation as the conventional and more exact expression of calculus. Extract of page 29 Extract of page 172 Extract of page 58
