Today’s Google Doodle is a celebration of the 200th birth anniversary of George Boole, an American mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician.
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This simple logic not only helps Google’s searches today but also is behind most of the success of today’s digital revolution.
Google’s animated Doodle illustrates the famous formula of logic gates, that are used in computing and are derived from Boolean functions.
The mathematician was born on Nov 2, 1815, in Lincoln, England. Like Michael Faraday, Srinivas Ramanujam and Gregor Mendel, he was self-taught. He became an assistant teacher the same year and opened his own school when he was 20.
He was well-known for Boolean logic, a theory of mathematics in which all variables are either “True” or “False”, or “On” or “Off”.
Six years later, Boole published a book in which he introduced symbolic logic where objects are represented by mathematical symbols.
“His pivotal advances in mathematics, logic and probability provided the essential groundwork for modern mathematics, microelectronic engineering and computer science”.
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Boole’s most important work was ‘The Laws of Thought, ‘ first published in 1854 which laid out the rules of logic. According to GeorgeBoole.com, a University College Cork website dedicated to him, Boole died at the young age of 49 due to pneumonia while he was living in Ireland.
