George Boole's life and the legacy of Boolean logic

From the Eponymous Adjectives Word List
Based on 4 mega-corpora
Total rank: 23rd
Math rank: 3rd
Top collocations: Boolean expression(s), Boolean function(s)

Sources:
sources: Wikipedia, the logical use of the Internet

Script:
George Boole was only 49 when he died, but his contribution to world culture has been immense. He had many interests, perhaps because he was very capable… or, he was very capable because he had many interests… uh… Ah! He had many interests AND he was very capable.
His parents were either desperate OR proud of him, because he became the head of his household, supporting dad, mom, and 3 siblings—when he was 16! He founded his own school at age 19, then… the list goes on.
He was very clever BUT NOT always practical. One day he walked 3 miles in the cold November Irish rain, then lectured in his wet clothes. He got sick. His wife’s treatment of keeping him soaked in water in bed didn’t work, then he died a few weeks later.
Now, I know this was just a few years after Florence Nightingale’s discoveries, so people still didn’t know a lot about recovery of health. But a U.S. president had died the same way two decades earlier, IMPLYING that people knew it was dangerous to get wet and stay wet!
…
Using mathematical and logical symbols, Boole thought he was on a path to describing all human language, and by extension, thought. He felt that ‘and’ is similar to multiplication, ‘or’ is similar to addition, ‘not’ is similar to subtraction.
We feel this when we visit people’s houses: At an acquaintance’s house, they say, “Hello, come in. Would you like coffee OR tea?” So we get something, but not as much as when we visit our parents’ house: “Hello! My dear! Have some wine, AND cheese, AND take a bath, AND watch TV!” On the other hand, when we visit our parents-in-law, they say, “You can have bread, BUT NOT beer.”
People also use Boolean searches everyday on the Internet. If you use double quotation marks for “coffee” and “chocolate” [you don’t have to type AND—Google knows!,] it means ‘I must have one with the other. It doesn’t make sense to know about coffee and not chocolate’; or, ‘I don’t care about chocolate if I don’t have any coffee.” So AND must be mutually inclusive.
However, if people don’t mind having coffee by itself, or chocolate by itself, but they definitely want one of the two, they can type “coffee” or “chocolate”. The OR operator may be either inclusive or exclusive.
Finally, some people only like coffee, and they are tired of all these search results that have a connection to chocolate. So they type “coffee” –“chocolate”, which means: ‘just coffee, NOT chocolate’. It must be mutually exclusive.
These operators are now called logical AND, logical OR, logical NOT.
Boole was brilliant for being among the first to recognize this connection, and the Boolean project was picked up by both mathematicians and philosophers [Jevons, Peirce, and Frege] who refined logical symbolism and its efficient deductive power. But Boolean logic didn’t turn out to be practical for analyzing the many different ways people use language. Of course it’s not his fault—he was ahead of his time, as the field of modern linguistics basically didn’t exist in the 1850s, and abstract algebra was just getting started.
So Boolean algebra wasn’t really talked about until the 1920s, which actually corresponds with the rise of Wittgenstein and the development of the linguistic turn in philosophy. By the 1940s, however, most philosophers, including Wittgenstein himself, had conceded that human language was too complex to be reduced to algebraic symbols.
But! The Boolean goal of fully describing the nature of the human mind was transferred to fully understanding the ‘language’ of digital circuits. As Boolean algebra is concerned with the binary expressions TRUE or FALSE, represented by 1 and 0, this was perfect for circuits being OPEN or CLOSED! It was explained in the 1930s, by Shannon, that a simple logic could solve complicated problems as long as it could operate fast enough—faster than humans could think.
Since then, Boolean expressions have been reprinted in thousands of computer science texts, making it one of the most used eponyms in the world. It’s incredible to think that, even if we had the physical tools to build computers in the 1830s, we didn’t have the mental tools. Evolution of technology turns in step with developments in math, which, more often than you might think, turn with philosophy.

Created and presented by Michael Henshaw