But enough about the future! It’s now time to dwell in the past. Just about every week, we like to celebrate the anniversaries of interesting events in technology history, and by “technology” – imagine me making air quotes – I mean anything sorta tech-y / science-y / math-y. Today we’re going to set our Wayback Machine to…

…July 1, 1646. That was the day Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz was born in Liepzig. Liebniz is renowned for developing differential and integral calculus pretty much at the exact same time as Sir Isaac Newton, but completely independently. The argument about who invented the calculus raged during their lifetimes, but Newton had more influential political backing, and the political fallout would dog Liebniz for the rest of his life. Despite that, Liebniz made significant contributions in the fields of philosophy, physics, psychology, computation and more. He designed mining equipment, hydraulic presses, submarines, and a steam engine.

Much is known about Liebniz’s career, but we have only second-hand information about his first job out of college, which was as a secretary of a secret alchemical society in Nuremberg. Scholars are skeptical about some of the details of the single retrospective account of that period in Liebniz’s life, but now that we’ve noted that, it’s a great story, so we’re going to repeat it anyways.

It seems that Liebniz, already a notable genius, didn’t know anything about alchemy or chemistry. And let’s note that alchemy and chemistry would be pretty much the same thing for another 100 years or so until Antoine Lavoisier would come along. But that’s a different story.

Liebniz was keen to infiltrate this society to learn alchemical secrets, so he hatches a plot to ask for a job. The problem is, he doesn’t know anything about alchemy. So he hunts down some of the thickest texts on chemistry he can find, and extracts some of the most obscure and convoluted language he can find in them. He then writes a letter to someone known to be one of the secret society’s members, and he does a core dump of the impenetrable jargon he got from his books. The recipient of the letter reads this gobbledygook and decides, Whoa! This Liebniz guy must be an alchemical adept already. And he gives Liebniz the job.

Seriously, who hasn’t lied on their resume?

Now I wanted to bring up Liebniz as much for Liebniz himself, as also because of Liebniz-Keks cookies.