Below the historians debate which American Presidents count as intellectual. Here I sing of math and the man, Gottfried Leibniz, German polymath, the smartest man that ever lived. I could sing out long and loud, but today I sing only one verse to make the case:*

In 1672, the Elector of Mainz sent the young diplomat Leibniz to Paris. The young diplomat Leibniz did little in the service of diplomacy, but instead met all of the intellectuals that he could find, including the Dutch mathematician Christian Huygens, and to his chagrin, the young Leibniz learned that his mathematical knowledge was quite deficient. So he decided to rectify the situation.

Three years later, on this day in 1675, he invented the calculus.

QED.

Of course, the claim that he invented the calculus was not (is not?) uncontroversial. Newton claimed to have developed his method of fluxions in 1666 or so, and…

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On this night in 1619, after a night in which he swears he was not carousing, René Descartes went to bed in an overheated, stuffy room in Ulm, and had three vivid dreams to which he later attributed the eventual course of his life.

In the first dream, a strong wind battered Descartes, and he sought shelter in the church of a college, only to be pushed back by the winds. After the winds abated he found himself surrounded by upright people, while he himself tottered along, leaning to the left. In the second dream, he perceived a loud thunderclap and saw the room filled with sparks of light. This apparently was a recurring dream for Descartes, so he meditated on logic until he fell asleep. (It’s like counting sheep, but for intellectuals.)

In the third dream, Descartes felt no terror, but instead came upon a book of verse, the first line of which read “Quod vitae sectabor iter?” and …

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Leni Riefenstahl was born on August 22nd, 1902.

Her artistic career began in dance, but, after a knee injury, she turned to film, starring in a number of silent pictures before her directorial debut, Das Blaue Licht. Her real artistic breakthrough, of course, was Triumph of the Will, a documentary about the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg. (Though “documentary” is perhaps inapt–the rally itself was planned with the film in mind, so the two seemed to have a symbiotic relationship.)

But, hey, you can read the wiki page yourself.

What interests me about “Triumph of the Will”– a film I’ve never seen– is that, at least on the surface, it looks like a case of a work of art that has aesthetic value while being morally bad. So it comes up a lot in conversations about the relationship between those sorts of values.

You might endorse that evaluation: you might say it’s aesthetically…

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