Leibniz Manuscript Research
Transcribed and translated previously unseen 17th-century Latin manuscripts by Leibniz on calculus and binary, and authored a universal transcription key for future scholars and AI systems.
- Research
- Neo-Latin
- OCR
- Calculus
- Binary
- History of Science
Roughly eight months of remote research, mentored by Dr. Harry Lewis (Harvard) and Dr. Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan University), on unpublished manuscripts by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the co-inventor of calculus and the originator of the binary system that every computer now runs on.
The work
I transcribed and translated previously unseen 17th-century Latin manuscripts on calculus and binary. Two distinct difficulties stack here:
Neo-Latin translation. Leibniz’s mathematical Latin is not classroom Latin. It is technical prose written by someone inventing the vocabulary as he goes, in a period before mathematical notation settled — so a term’s meaning has to be reconstructed from how he uses it rather than looked up.
Handwriting. These are working manuscripts: 350-year-old handwriting, abbreviated, corrected, and written for an audience of one. OCR helps, but the failure modes of an OCR system on 17th-century script are exactly the characters that matter most.
The transcription key
The output I care about most isn’t a single translation — it’s the universal transcription key I wrote to go with it.
Every scholar who works on these manuscripts re-derives the same mappings: this mark means that character, this abbreviation expands to that word, this correction pattern indicates a revision. A documented, consistent key turns that private knowledge into shared infrastructure — usable both by the next human researcher and as ground truth for training an AI system to read the rest of the corpus.
That’s the part that connects this to the rest of my work. It’s the same problem as the robotics: taking something a skilled human does by intuition and rendering it explicit enough that a machine can do it at scale.
Why a robotics student did Latin research
Because the interesting question in Leibniz’s papers is the same one in my current field — how do you get a formal system to represent something real? He was working out how to write down continuous change and how to encode any number in two symbols. Reading his drafts is watching that happen before the notation existed to make it easy.