The Meaning of Answers, George Boole's Laws of Thought

Ever wondered how your smartphone got so smart? How digital devices think? Excellent questions because it’s fundamental to know what shapes our thinking, even when it’s only directing us to choose one coffee shop over another.

The Meaning of Answers: George Boole’s Laws of Thought tells the rich story of how a 19th-century teacher—a man so unlucky that his wife, who loved him dearly, unintentionally killed him—changed the universe: he was the world’s first psychologist, he redefined infinity, gave us nonlinear logic, invented the field of “higher mathematics” and formulated The Laws of Thought, the logic of human learning and foundation of digital devices.

Precocious and self-educated, 17-year-old George Boole was fired as a boarding-school teacher. The year was 1832. Education was basically rote memorization, the acquiring of established facts. Whoever knew the most facts was judged smartest. Boole countered that facts are nothing more than current beliefs. Reality doesn’t lie, but it changes. What doesn’t change is how we learn. The “how” is power, what we learn merely inventory. It was an insight that cost Boole his boarding school job and a hundred years later gave us computers.

Boole is the greatest change agent since Aristotle in logic. He is the most consequential figure in mathematics in 4,600 years. What sparked him? Could it have been as simple as teaching 1+1 doesn’t equal 2? No, something less abstract than that. Might it have been his natural science methodology for learning and then teaching others? I think so. What I hope you take away from reading The Meaning of Answers is the natural simplicity of learning.

Please enjoy.