In this episode, I hope to illustrate some of the ideas about logic and formal systems that emerged around the turn of the century. The work on logic as it pertains to human thought paved the way for the explosion of invention and enterprise that we'll discuss soon, as we're getting closer to the introduction of the electronic technology that in some sense embodied these ideas, ushering in the digital age.
Read More#005 | George Boole
Up until this point in our journey, we've talked about the origins of computation, reaching way back to the emergence of the abacus and similar accounting instruments in ancient Mesopotamia and China. We've covered the inventions of many great thinkers like Pascal and Leibniz, most recently Charles Babbage’s concepts of the Difference and Analytical Engines and examined the story of Ada Lovelace and her extraordinary vision of the great implications that these types of machines would have on the world.
In this episode we’ll turn to the life of a philosopher and mathematician whose name is recognizable to any software developer and perhaps also known to anyone who's studied a bit of logic or mathematics - and that's George Boole.
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