Reactions When he had first raised the question of Grandi's series to Leibniz, Wolff was inclined toward skepticism along with Marchetti. Upon reading Leibniz's reply in mid-1712, Wolff was so pleased with the solution that he sought to extend the arithmetic mean method to more divergent series such as . Leibniz's intuition prevented him from straining his solution this far, and he wrote back that Wolff's idea was interesting but invalid for several reasons. For one, the terms of a summable series should decrease to zero; even could be expressed as a limit of such series. Leibniz described Grandi's series along with the general problem of convergence and divergence in letters to Nicolaus I Bernoulli in 1712 and early 1713. J. Dutka suggests that this correspondence, along with Nicolaus I Bernoulli's interest in probability, motivated him to formulate the St. Petersburg paradox, another situation involving a divergent series, in September 1713. According to Pierre-Simon Laplace in his Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités, Grandi's series was connected with Leibniz seeing "an image of the Creation in his binary arithmetic", and thus Leibniz wrote a letter to Jesuit missionary Claudio Filippo Grimaldi, court mathematician in China, in the hope that Claudio Filippo Grimaldi's interest in science and the mathematical "emblem of creation" might combine to convert the nation to Christianity. Laplace remarks, "I record this anecdote only to show how far the prejudices of infancy may mislead the greatest men." Divergence Jacob Bernoulli Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) dealt with a similar series in 1696 in the third part of his Positiones arithmeticae de seriebus infinitis. Applying Nicholas Mercator's method for polynomial long division to the ratio , he noticed that one always had a remainder. If then this remainder decreases and "finally is less than any given quantity", and one has If m = n, then this equation becomes Bernoulli called this equation a "not inelegant paradox". Varignon Pierre Varignon (1654–1722) treated Grandi's series in his report Précautions à prendre dans l'usage des Suites ou Series infinies résultantes…. The first of his purposes for this paper was to point out the divergence of Grandi's series and expand on Jacob Bernoulli's 1696 treatment. (Varignon's math…) The final version of Varignon's paper is dated February 16, 1715, and it appeared in a volume of the Mémories of the French Academy of Sciences that was itself not published until 1718. For such a relatively late treatment