George Boole · Boolean algebra
Can thinking be calculated?
That time, that place
A shoemaker's son with almost no formal schooling. Self-taught in several languages and in mathematics, he was a teacher at sixteen and eventually professor of mathematics at Cork.
Why this question
Since Aristotle, logic had been done in words: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.
Boole asked whether it could be written like algebra — whether the rules of thought could be put into symbols and computed.
What was found
He set true to one and false to zero, and treated and, or, and not as operations close to multiplication and addition.
A problem in logic becomes a problem in calculation. No need to follow the meaning in your head — move the symbols by rule and the answer appears.
It was entirely abstract. He was not doing it because it was useful. His book was called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, and to his contemporaries it looked like speculation with no possible application.
Logic was something argued in words
A system of operations built on true as one and false as zero
Eighty-five years later Shannon noticed this algebra has the same structure as switching circuits. Every computer today runs on it