# Explication de l’arithmétique binaire is printed as a dated binary-arithmetic memoir

Date: 1703

## The fact

In 1703 Leibniz published Explication de l’arithmétique binaire, setting out binary place-value arithmetic and its analogy with I Ching figures as he then read them. It is not a later stored-program machine.

It is one event.

## Context

MacTutor and the Akademie-Ausgabe independently date the 1703 print. Do not claim later digital computers as his lifetime welfare path.

[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz](/people/gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz)’s documented role is bounded by other offices and collaborators named in the sources below. Sharing a field with them is not a reason to drop a documented act, and it is not a reason to assign later consequences done in the name after death.

Conventional years are 1646–1716. Surviving public files are GWLB Nachlass pages, the Akademie-Ausgabe, SEP, and encyclopedias. Leibniz did not typeset those later pages. Later electronic computers are not this life.

Named person as heading of the dated public instrument. Later editors, museums, printers, or offices share publication. Complex where later carriers are the surviving public file.

## Evidence and sources

The Akademie-Ausgabe portal and MacTutor independently describe the 1703 binary memoir.

Official or archival record: Leibniz-Edition — Akademie-Ausgabe portal (https://www.leibnizedition.de/; Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities / Göttingen Academy).

## Significance

Knowledge-access path. High confidence on 1703; refused: later computing as this act.

## What is established and what is not

Established: the 1703 binary memoir was printed. Not established: a unique twentieth-century computer series caused by 1703.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

Established here: a sourced, dated public instrument with a named contribution by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

They are not a public rating.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did not file a later UNESCO form, a later Loeb colophon, or a later museum label as a personal act. A portrait or conventional bust is not this mechanism. Allegation, reconstruction, and established occurrence stay distinct.

## People

- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: https://factrail.ai/people/gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz

## Sources

- https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Leibniz/
- https://www.leibnizedition.de/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/gwl-binary-1703