Slashdot Mirror
Boolean Logic : George Boole's The Laws of Thought
Ian writes "The Globe and Mail has a piece about the man behind Boolean Logic - George Boole - The Isaac Newton of logic. 'It was 150 years ago that George Boole published his classic The Laws of Thought, in which he outlined concepts that form the underpinnings of the modern high-speed computer.'"
I'm a bit confused why you mention the BBC...
"Also that year, Grace Hopper, an admiral in the U.S. Navy, recorded the first computer "bug" -- a moth stuck between the relays of a pre-digital computer.)"
Ahh, but relays are digital.... They are either on or off. That was binary the last I looked.
Parent post is completely wrong. The complete title is actually "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities".
While that's a pretty clumsy way of saying, it, Shakespeare was ahead of Boole.
I suggest we all add the following statement (or equivalent) to our code in honor of this great mind.
typedef bool shakespear;
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
The Isaac Newton of LOGIC. Not modern computers.
RTF Post.
It's probably the same reason multiplication has a higher precedence than addition. Multiplication and AND are equivalents, and addition and OR are equivalents.
In fact, for most practical purposes, AND *is* multiplication and OR *is* addition. Just compare the truth tables with multiplication and addition tables (one minor technicality, of course, is that addition carries while OR does not; the carry bit is simply the result of A AND B).
It was a really good paper.
Intuitively, checking if the elements of a set are all true should have presedens over checking if one of them is true.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Can't say Ritchie was much of an Isaac Newton type. Creative and productive? Yes. Genius? No.
Knuth, very intelligent and productive but his original contributions were not huge.
von Neumann is a good one, as is Turing.