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George Boole: An Investigation into the Laws of Thought (Boolean Logic) 1854
From an early career as a schoolmaster, his mathematical talents were recognised when Boole was appointed Professor of Mathematics at University College, Cork. His primary studies were of two aspects of mathematics of special relevance to 20th century computing - differential equations, and the mathematical analysis of logic (symbolic logic, sometimes called the algebra of logic). Boole’s predicates including the logical operations of AND/OR, NAND/NOR (etc) seemed to have little real- world application in the mid-19th century, but around a hundred years later, the mathematician Claude Shannon (then at MIT) recognised the application of Boolean logic in his work on Communications Theory (1949), and it has become a standard aspect of programming, of microprocessor design, of digital telecommunications..
The operation of Boolean ‘logic gates’ in micro-electronic circuitry (such as a computer chip) enable mere digital binary machines to perform complex logical operations - in other words Boolean logic can be directly implemented in electronic circuits by stringing logic gates of different types together. Boolean logic is the theoretical substrate upon which modern digital technology is built.
It is uncontroversial to saythat George Boole probably had more influence on 20th century computing than Charles Babbage. While Babbage’s steam-driven calculators and his unfinished Analytical Engine are great grist to the Steam-P unk novelists - Gibson and Sterling, proposing in their alternative history that Babbage’s computers had become a nation-changing industry, alongside the telegraph, called their imaginary programmers ‘clackers’ because of the noise the Jacquard punch-cards make when they drive the mechanical computers (Gibson and Sterling: The Difference Engine 1990) - but Babbage’s innovations weighed little in the development of the electric-powered digital computing that marks the beginning of our digital age in the 1940s. Claude Shannon’s rediscovery and incorporation of Boole’s work however, with his paper The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) has had a profound and lasting effect on telecommunications and computer science - the very bedrock of our 21st century globally networked world. I first came across Boolean operators in the early paintboxes (like the Spaceward Supernova c1985), and authoring software, where Boolean logic underpinned the range of colours and colour mixing-effects offered by these computer-based machines.