Google Search is known for its Doodles, which the company implements to celebrate significant events in human history or the great men and women that made significant contributions to further our civilization. However, today's Doodle may not make sense to everyone.
Going into Google Search, users will be greeted with an animated Google logo that shifts a combination of grey, red, yellow, green and black, along with the x and y variables and Boolean operators. If you haven't figured it out already, it's George Boole's 200th birthday.
The English philosopher, education and above all things, mathematician, is celebrating his mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician was born in Nov. 2, 1815, which makes today his second centennial birthday. Boole is highly-regarded on his various works within the fields algebraic logic and differential equations but most know him because his 1854 book, An investigation into the Laws of Thought, on Which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, which came after 1947's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic that was his first writeup in which symbolic logic was presented.
"I am now about to set seriously to work upon preparing for the press an account of my theory of Logic and Probabilities which in its present state I look upon as the most valuable if not the only valuable contribution that I have made or am likely to make to Science and the thing by which I would desire if at all to be remembered hereafter," an excerpt from George Boole's letter to Sir William Thomson who formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics - the absolute temperature unit, Kelvin, was named after him.
In his book, Boole presented the Boolean algebra, which laid the foundations for the information age to thrive. Without the Boolean algebra, the circuitry that powers computers and motors, among other things, would not have developed the way it did and ushered us into the current age where most ingrates go about their day and enjoy the convenience that is the internet.
Boole's work allows us to translate whatever we want to tell our machines to do into mathematical equations that the machines can understand. Remember the 1's and 0's that were prominently presented by the Matrix movie series? Binary? Yes, those both derivatives of the Boolean Logic, which reduces everything to yes or no, true or false, on or off, 1 or 0. Simply put, using it we can create arguments that will tell our machines how to respond to what we do.
