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George
Boole (1815-1864)
George Boole was born in England in 1815 and was raised
in a working class family. Despite not receiving an
upper class education he managed to teach himself Latin
and Greek when he was very young, and later on he mastered
French, German and Italian. His first profession was
as a teacher, and he even opened his own school at the
age of twenty. He was very interested in mathematics
and read books by some great masters such as Gauss and
Laplace, which led him to have new ideas on the calculus
of variations which were even published in The Cambridge
Mathematical Journal. He was later awarded a gold medal
by the Royal Society of Mathematics for his numerous
articles. "The Laws of Thought" was an important basis
for work leading to the foundations of modern mathematics.
His idea was to represent information only with the
two logic states true or false. He gave the mathematics
ideas and formulas to do calculations on this information.
In 1937, nearly 75 years after Boole's death, Claude
Shannon, a student at MIT recognised the connection
between electronic circuits and Boolean algebra. He
transferred the two logic states to electronic circuits
by assigning different voltage levels to each state.
This connection was essential for the design of digital
computers.
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