The notion of variation in Leibniz (1646--1716) (Q2836333)

A very short survey on the significance of the \textit{ars combinatoria} for Leibniz's mathematics and on his definition of variation in that context is presented. Beside his early treatise on the subject, Leibniz published very few of his contributions. Thus his work on number-theoretical and set-theoretical partitions, symmetric functions, determinants and insurance theory remained largely unknown until the 20th century. Much of this work was motivated by Leibniz's study of algebraic equations. More details can be found in the author's article with the same title [Archimedes 30, 235--251 (2012; Zbl 1239.01050)].