Everyday
passes with googling something. I am one
impressed by Google doodles ~ and post on them too… today saw one which first
made me google on Lincolnshire, which otherwise I would not have read [think
that it is not part of English Cricket league !]. Lincolnshire is a historical county in the
east of England. It borders Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and
Nottinghamshire [both play cricket !!] and more.
Today’s interesting doodle in on the Lincolnshire-born
academic, widely heralded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the
19th century, devising a system of logic that aimed to condense complex
thoughts into simple equations. His legacy was
Boolean logic, a theory of mathematics in which all variables are either
"true" or "false", or "on" or "off".
The theory preceded the digital age. 2015 sees the 200th anniversary of his birth and marking the bicentenary year,
University College Cork joins admirers
of the man around the world to celebrate
his life and legacy. Google's animated Doodle illustrates the logic gates that
are used in computing and are derived from Boolean functions.
The
first "g", the two "o"s, the "l" and
"e" in the Google logo light up based on the logic gates underneath
them. When the "x" and "y" in the second "g"
light up, they are on, activating other letters at different times. Honestly, too much for a man whose understanding
of Maths at school level itself was poor.
The man is George
Boole and naturally today there would be thousands of more searches on ‘ Who he
is ?’- curiosity aroused by the doodle of the day.
George Boole 1815 -
1864) was an English mathematician, educator,
philosopher and logician. He worked in the fields of differential equations and
algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought. According
to GeorgeBoole.com, a University College Cork website dedicated to him,
"his legacy surrounds us everywhere, in the computers, information storage
and retrieval, electronic circuits and controls that support life, learning and
communications in the 21st century. "His
pivotal advances in mathematics, logic and probability provided the essential
groundwork for modern mathematics, microelectronic engineering and computer
science."
Born 200 years ago
on November 2, his algebraic approach to logic, in which all values are reduced
to either "true" or "false", drives people today. He also devised a type of linguistic algebra,
now known as Boolean algebra, the three most basic operations of which are
"and", "or" and "not". In layman's terms his theory of logic is
premised on predicting what happens for each of these binary states.
A largely
self-taught child prodigy, Boole never attended university and was forced to
leave school at 16 years old after his father's shoe business collapsed. He
became an assistant teacher the same year and opened his own school when he was
20. He was just 24 when he published his
first research paper. In 1849, he was
appointed the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. Boole died of pneumonia in 1864, when he was
49 years old, after he walked two miles through cold rain and then lectured
wearing his wet clothes !
As we know, the
Google search page is not plain. It has Google logo and many a times
animated expressions – which keep changing. Google has had several logos
since its renaming from BackRub. These special logos, some designed by
Dennis Hwang, have come to be known as Google Doodles.~ and today is the mathematical
one on ‘George Boole’.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
2nd
Nov. 2015.
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