David Wilkins

Yesterday on a visit to Lincoln, I came across this highly informative memorial to one of the city’s most distinguished sons, the mathematician George Boole - as in Boolean logic/algebra - described here as the grandfather of the digital age.

#GeorgeBoole #BooleanLogic #BooleanAlgebra #dwprovinvialbritain

Dec 18, 2024 at 10:46amWeb
Show threadDavid WilkinsDec 18, 2024

George Boole’s wife Mary was a significant mathematician, educator and author in her own right. She was a member of the Everest family and her uncle George Everest was the British surveyor after whom the world’s tallest mountain was named.

The Turing Prize holder and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is a great great grandson of George and Mary Boole.

And I had no idea of any of that until I looked it up on Wikipedia this morning!

Show threadThomasDec 18, 2024
@davidwilkins It's amazing what we can achieve when we abolish uncertainty... Turing, von Neumann and Shannon knew very well what it meant to use Boolean Logic for inference. We should make every effort to remain aware of the underlying assumptions.
Show threadDavid WilkinsDec 18, 2024
@tg9541 I’m not so up on the maths but the aspect I find fascinating is that despite his eminence, Boole seems to have been mainly self-taught and also led a provincial existence miles from the then main centres of intellectual life, which I think in the UK would have been Oxford, Cambridge and the Scottish unis, with London University just starting up, and then when he went to Ireland it was to rural Cork, rather than the more obvious Trinity in Dublin.
Show threadThomasDec 18, 2024
@davidwilkins Yes, it's true, Boole was an extraordinary man.