George Boole Publishes An Investigation of the Laws of Thought

The Boolean binary logic that underpins all of computation and thus contemporary society traces back to this 1854 book.

George Boole published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, while professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork. Largely self-taught, he stated his aim in the first sentence: “to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus.” He treated logic as algebra over two values, 1 and 0, true and false. In 1937 Claude Shannon's master's thesis showed that switching circuits obey Boole's algebra, and digital computers have been built on it ever since.