After inventing calculus, actuarial tables, and the mechanical calculator and coining the phrase “best of all possible worlds,” Gottfried Leibniz still felt his life’s work was incomplete. Since boyhood, the 17th-century polymath had dreamed of creating what he called a characteristica universalis—a language that perfectly represented all scientific truths and would render making new discoveries as easy as writing grammatically correct sentences. This “alphabet of human thought” would leave no room for falsehoods or ambiguity, and Leibniz would work on it until the end of his life.
A version of Leibniz’s dream lives on today in programming languages. They don’t represent the totality of the physical and philosophical universe, but
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