Celebrate the 200th Birthday of George Boole With Logic (i-programmer.info)

mikejuk writes: November 2nd 2015 is the bicentenary of George Boole, dubbed the forefather of modern information technology. To mark the event 55,000 school students globally will be learning about Boolean Logic. Free lesson plans, puzzles and worksheets have been made available in English, Irish and Mandarin and schools in over 30 countries have signed up. According to the George Boole 200 website set up by University College Cork (UCC), the Irish university where he was the first Professor of Mathematics in the mid-19th century, Boole is an unsung hero of the digital age who deserves to be recognized as the forefather of the Information Age. An hour-long documentary, The Genius of George Boole, will be released on November 2 and available to view online until November 16. Although Boole did briefly encounter Charles Babbage during his lifetime he wasn't responsible for bringing together binary arithmetic and what we now call Boolean logic. That achievement is down to Claude Shannon who recognised the relevance for engineering of Boole's symbolic logic. As a result of Shannon's work Boole's thinking became the practical foundation of digital circuit design and the theoretical grounding of the the digital age.

Comments

I can tell you one thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the UK Government, or, indeed, anyone in the UK, will NOT be celebrating this centenary. We don't recognise our scientists.

As an aside, 2015 is the 800th anniversary of the birth of Roger Bacon, a British Franciscan friar who was pivotal in the early development of the Scientific Method. It is arguable that he 'invented science' - certainly there are few others of whom this could be said. And yet the entire British (and World) academic community have completely ignored the passage of this date.

Unsung hero?

[blind biker]

In every academic institution I studied or worked, every professor of mathematics and electronics-related subject acknowledged Boole as the founder of digital logic.