The True Method

Harry Lewis pointed Bill and me to Gottfried Leibniz's 1677 treatise The True Method (translated by ChatGPT from the original French). I highly recommend taking the time to read this three page document where he talks about formalizing all human knowledge.The second paragraph has some of the intuition for P v NP three centuries before Cook, Levin and Gödel. But knowledge depends on proof, and discovering proofs requires a certain method that is not known to everyone. Every person is capable of judging a proof, since it would not deserve to be called a proof unless everyone who considered it carefully found it convincing. Nevertheless, not everyone is capable of discovering proofs independently or of presenting them clearly once they have been found, whether for lack of time or for lack of method. Though by "not everyone" he might have excluded himself.Every investigation that depends on reasoning would be carried out by manipulating these symbols, through a kind of calculation. This…