George Boole image via Wikimedia Commons
Today’s Google Doodle is celebrating George Boole’s 200th Birthday in quite the showing, with the mathematician’s genius front and centre in a basic, colourful and clever presentation.
Celebrations on George Boole’s life have been ongoing all year, with UCC, in particular, going out of its way to remember the genius’ work.
Back in 1849, the Lanchashire-born Boole was appointed as the first Professor of Maths at UCC, with his binary ‘Boolean’ system revolutionising how people approached logic, maths, engineering and, ultimately, computer science.
Boole’s work underpinned today’s information age, laying the foundations upon which most of the technology we use today is based.
His Boolean logic was what American Claude Shannon applied to build the electrical circuits in the 1930s, directly leading to modern computers.
“A very happy 11001000th birthday to genius George Boole!” says Google, which itself is based on Boole’s revolutionary, simple, ‘Yes’ and ‘no’, ‘x’ and ‘y’ or, to put things into a digitised setting ‘0’ and ‘1’ concept of how the world works.
The Doodle reflects Boolean logic, each letter charged by its own signifiers. For example, the first ‘O’ of Google’s name is the exclusive ‘or’ gate, meaning that it only lights up when only one of ‘x’ or ‘y’ is true.
The latter ‘G’, therefore, feeds the cycle.
