Inspiration
Neal Stephenson was inspired to write The Baroque Cycle when, while working on Cryptonomicon, he encountered a statement by George Dyson in Darwin Among the Machines that suggests Leibniz was "arguably the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines." He also had heard considerable discussion of the Leibniz – Newton feud and Newton's work at the treasury during the last 30 years of his life. He found "this information striking when was already working on a book about money and a book about computers." Further research into the period excited Stephenson and he embarked on writing the historical piece that became The Baroque Cycle.
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