The Genius of George Boole

I managed to come across this program on Amazon streaming, which ironically would never have been possible without Boolean Logic that self-taught Irish mathematician George Boole developed in the early 1800s.

You see the system of logic he developed is the direct forerunner of the binary approach that all electronic computers and computer systems run on. His ideas and findings were published but lay dormant for some 80 years because he was so far ahead of the times. His ideas were strictly academic, in that there was no application for it almost 200 years ago.

But in the 1900s, as electronics advanced, a key scientist in the field discovered Boole's work and recognized that it would enable the computational techniques that revolutionized our world and led to digital computing. Sure, it is possible that had Boole never existed someone else might have independently come up with the same ideas. Yet maybe not, and who knows how long, and if not then our world with cell phones, digital TV, space travel, the internet, online purchasing, credit cards, virtually everything we depend on in our modern world would never have been possible.

That's the beauty of science and mathematics, guys like Newton, Einstein, Boole, and many others crop up randomly, get interested in the world around them and make discoveries with no end in mind other than to better understand what is going on. And in each case our world would be quite different if those great minds did not in fact crop up randomly and make their discoveries.

"The Genius of George Boole" is interesting and valuable for much more than just a glimpse at his life. Very nice program. It does help to be a math and science person.

It's interesting enough, but I was confused as to whom they were aiming at with this. Geeks would want a discussion of Boolean algebra, and lay people wouldn't really care to watch this, so why was there none of the maths presented in the programme? As such, the film falls between two stools and satisfies no-one. I couldn't help feeling that they were struggling to big up Boole more than he warranted, but it's still kind of watchable.