Textbook of AI

1815–1864, Mathematician, logician

Also known as: George Boole FRS

George Boole was a self-taught English mathematician who, in The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and the more developed An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), reduced Aristotelian logic to algebra. By treating logical propositions as variables that take the values 0 or 1 and defining the operations and, or and not in terms of arithmetic on those values, he created Boolean algebra , the symbolic substrate on which every digital computer and every theorem prover is built.

Boole's algebra was largely a curiosity in his own century. It was Claude Shannon who, in his 1937 master's thesis, recognised that Boolean algebra exactly described the behaviour of relay switching circuits, and so connected Boole's logic of propositions to the engineering of computing machinery. Every modern AND, OR and NOT gate, every truth-table-based circuit minimisation method, and every SAT solver descends directly from Boole's work.

Born in Lincoln to working-class parents, Boole had no university degree and was largely self-educated. He nevertheless became professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork (now University College Cork) in 1849, where he wrote his major works on logic, differential equations and probability. He died of pneumonia in 1864 at the age of 49 after walking three miles to lecture in cold rain. His youngest daughter, Ethel Lilian Voynich, wrote The Gadfly; his great-great-grandson Geoffrey Hinton became a foundational figure of the deep learning era.