First Application of Boolean Algebra
When we think of Boolean algebra (the maths of dealing with TRUE and FALSE, the operations of AND, OR, NOT), we think of it as only being relevant to the way digital computers work. And yet the first application of Boolean algebra wasn’t to do with computers at all! Here is that story from Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s biography of Claude Shannon (the founder of Information Theory) titled A Mind at Play . When Shannon was a student at MIT, he was studying electrical circuits: 1) A switch could be used to turn on or off the current; 2) Arranging the circuit elements in different ways allowed for current to flow only when, say, two switches were On, but not if zero, one or three switches were On. But designing such circuits was an art in those days, not a science, “with all the mess and false-starting and indefinable intuition that “art” implies”. Shannon also learnt Boolean algebra, the algebra from over a century ea...