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Showing posts from November 2, 2015

George Boole’s 200th Birthday

  Here’s an easy, yes-or-no question: Is the universe complex? YES, of course, you could say; it would be crazy to think otherwise! But on the other hand, British mathematician   George Boole   taught us that NO, things can be seen as relatively simple; any values can be pared down to yes or no, true or false, or 0 or 1 (which, here at Google, is our personal favorite). In 1849, Boole was appointed as the first Professor of Mathematics at   University College Cork , where he pioneered developments in logic and mathematics. His beautiful binary “Boolean” system was detailed in   An Investigation of the Laws of Thought   in 1854, which inevitably enabled revolutionary thinking in not just logic and math, but also engineering and computer science. As one of the most important scientists to have ever worked in Ireland, Boole effectively laid the foundations of the entire Information Age while working from UCC. So it’s fair to say that without George Boole, there’d be no Goog