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Born in a very poor family of a small vendor, George Boole was predisposed to only certain
low level occupations. The schools he could go to were just too limited in his quest for
knowledge. He saw knowledge and a way to change his social status. With support of his
father he was learning languages (Greek and Latin).
He was one of first who had crossed the barrier between European and British mathematicians.
Before Boole, main math object were numbers, but he had put everything on test: even the
laws of thinking. He studied the operations separated from operands and devised what we
know today as Boolean Algebra. He had discovered "the rules of the game".
After Boole, mathematicians became obsessed with abstraction and symbolic logic.
Without Boole's "Laws of Thought" today's computers would be very different,
or maybe would not even exist.
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