Customer Reviews

George Boole - Selected Manuscripts on Logic and its Philosophy (Science Networks. Historical Studies)

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While Boole is considered one of the founders of computing, few people have actually read his papers. This book offers a chance to remedy that omission. It gives a sampling of papers that show Boole's thinking, and how this changed over his lifetime. The papers also somewhat indirectly reflect how logic was perceived by other mathematicians in Victorian Britain.

The book can be a trifle frustrating. Boole and others of his time had no hardware or software in which to apply their logic. Which is a tribute to how much he was able to accomplish, through pure deductive reasoning. But one cannot help wondering how much further he would have been able to pursue his research, if he had access to even simple functioning computers. Very analogous to Babbage and Lovelace. In contrast to Claude Shannon, who was able to see his research instantiated in hardware and software during his lifetime.