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We may encode the letters of a chosen word as numbers by the substitution a=1, b=2 etc. If we then write the result, preceded by a zero and punctuated as in this example: [0; 12, 5, 9, 2, 14, 9, 26] WolframAlpha will interpret this input as a continued fraction representation and return the fraction 332462/4054663 ~~0.0819949771411335541326... (followed by more digits). Entering the decimal in WolframAlpha will return the original numeric code.
In the case of 0.045317973977950402535096, this is [0; 22, 15, 12, 20, 1, 9, 18, 5], corresponding to Voltaire. As is obvious from the text of the puzzle, the remaining decimals correspond to Leibniz and his other great antagonist, Newton, respectively.
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