The Laws of Thought, published in 1854, is widely held as George Boole’s masterpiece in mathematical logic. Boole sought to express the basic operations of reasoning in symbolic mathematical form, to construct a ‘science of logic’, which he believed would shed light on the mechanics of cognition and the human mind. The work is a deeply creative exploration of these ’laws of thought’, which, along with his first monograph, Mathematical Analysis of Logic, established the field of algebraic logic.
George Boole (1815-1864) was a self taught mathematician, polymath, and
professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork, Ireland. In his respective
discipline of Mathematics, he worked in the area of differential equations and
algebraic logic. His developments in algebra provided the groundwork for binary
logic applications, which form the foundation of digital circuits, as well as
programming in computer science. The lasting influence of his work is
exemplified by the fundamental data type from computer science, the Boolean,
which has Boole as it’s namesake.