Peter O'Hara MBE

A shoemaker's son who left school at 16 wrote a book in 1854 that nobody knew what to do with, and 83 years later a 21-year-old at MIT opened it and found the blueprint for every computer chip on Earth. I went down this rabbit hole at 1am and I still can't get over how thin the thread is. His name was George Boole. The book is called The Laws of Thought. Boole never went to university. Not for a single day. His father fixed shoes in Lincoln, England, and spent his spare money on telescopes and math books instead of the shop. The shop failed. At 16, George started teaching just to feed the family. So he taught himself everything else at night. At 14 he translated an ancient Greek poem into English. A local paper printed it. A schoolmaster wrote in to say no boy that age could have done it. By 1849, a university in Ireland made him its first professor of mathematics. A man with no degree, now handing them out. Then he asked a strange question. What if thinking follows rules, the same way numbers do? Every argument you've ever had is built from statements that are either true or false. "It's raining." "I have an umbrella." Boole wanted to do math on those, the way you do math on 2 and 3. So he built an algebra with only two numbers. - 1 means true - 0 means false - AND works like multiplying - OR joins two ideas together - NOT flips one into the other The whole system rested on one odd little equation. x times x equals x. Try it with any normal number and it breaks. 5 times 5 is not 5. It only works for two numbers in the entire universe. Zero and one. "Let us conceive, then, of an Algebra in which the symbols x, y, z, &c. admit indifferently of the values 0 and 1, and of these values alone." That's Boole, in 1854. Mathematicians found it clever. Philosophers argued about it. Nobody built a single thing with it. Boole died ten years later at 49, after walking two miles to a lecture in pouring rain. He never saw his idea do anything useful. Jump to 1936. A 20-year-old named Claude Shannon is working on a giant calculating machine at MIT. It's packed with relays, little electrical switches that click open and shut. Wiring them together is mostly guesswork. But Shannon had taken a philosophy class back at the University of Michigan. It covered Boole. He looked at the switches and saw the 1s and 0s. - A closed switch lets current through. That's 1. - An open switch blocks it. That's 0. - Two switches in a row only pass current if both are closed. That's AND. - Two switches side by side pass current if either one is closed. That's OR. Boole's algebra of thought was also an algebra of electricity. Same rules. Same two numbers. Shannon wrote it up as his master's thesis in 1937. The psychologist Howard Gardner later called it possibly the most important master's thesis of the century. Shannon just shrugged. "It just happened that no one else was familiar with both fields at the same time." Sit with that for a second. The idea was sitting in a library for 83 years. It only needed one person who happened to be standing in two rooms at once. The phone in your hand holds billions of those switches. Every photo, every text, every AI answer is them flipping between 1 and 0, following rules a self-taught teacher wrote down before the light bulb existed. Boole thought he was writing down how the human mind works. He ended up writing down how machines would think.