6. What Is Boolean Logic and How It Works

If you want to understand the answer to this question down at the very core, the first thing you need to understand is something called Boolean logic. Boolean logic, originally developed by George Boole in the mid-1800s, allows quite a few unexpected things to be mapped into bits and bytes. The great thing about Boolean logic is that, once you get the hang of things, Boolean logic (or at least the parts you need in order to understand the operations of computers) is outrageously simple. In this chapter, we will first discuss simple logic “gates” and then see how to combine them into something useful. A contemporary of Charles Babbage, whom he briefly met, Boole is, these days, credited as being the “forefather of the information age.” An Englishman by birth, in 1849, he became the first professor of mathematics in Ireland new Queen’s College (now University College) Cork. He died at the age of 49 in 1846, and his work might never have had an impact on computer science without somebody like Claude Shannon, who 70 years later recognized the relevance for engineering of Boole’s symbolic logic. As a result, Boole’s thinking has become the practical foundation of digital circuit design and the theoretical grounding of the digital age.