Google Celebrates English mathematician George Boole’s 200th Birthday

Monday’s special doodle is visible on a majority of Google’s homepages across the world. Boole, who was born November 2, 1815, in Lincoln, England, and died December 8, 1864, in County Cork in Ireland, is known as the author of The Laws of Thought and inventor of Boolean algebra.

George Boole was a mathematician, logician and philosopher whose legacy of Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age.

Google’s animated Doodle illustrates the famous formula of logic gates, that are used in computing and are derived from Boolean functions.

The different letters of the Google logo light-up based on the logic gates marked under them.

Despite an incomplete schooling, Boole became a teacher and even started his own school. At 24, he published his first paper, Researches on the Theory of Analytical Transformations, in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. Boolean logic preceded the digital era, and it was first employed by American Claude Shannon to develop the first electrical circuits in 1930s, which later translated to modern computers.

According to a website GeorgeBoole.com, created by University of Cork, Boole taught himself Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, mechanics, astronomy, along with applied and pure mathematics.

A largely self-taught child prodigy, Boole never attended university and was forced to leave school at 16 years old after his father’s shoe business collapsed.