Where Does the Word “Boolean” Come From?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes, my name is Grace. I’m calling from Savannah, Georgia.

Hey, Grace, welcome.

Hi, Grace. What’s on your mind?

Hi, yes, I’m in school down here for industrial design, and I’m learning a 3D modeling software where we learn to prototype and 3D print objects. And one of the most useful functions in the program is called a Boolean. It’s B-O-O-L-E-A-N. And it’s so much fun to say, and we use it all of the time, because in order to make complex shapes in this program, you have to do it by building upon simple geometric shapes. And so it kind of works as a 3D Venn diagram. And depending on what you need to build, you can have it take away certain parts of an object where they overlap or leave only that section where they overlap. And I was just wondering if you guys had ever heard of that term because it’s so out of place in the tech world that it just seemed so bizarre.

Boolean. So it’s like somebody invented a word out of just letters or syllables.

That is what it feels like. That’s really what it feels like. I wouldn’t put it past the tech world.

Really?

Yes. I have a story for you, Grace. There’s a great story here. And it starts with a poor boy, an English poor boy, largely self-taught, born to a lady’s maid and a shoemaker who went on to lay some fundamental foundations that are still used today in computing, in neuroscience, in logic and mathematics. You want to hear it? Okay, yes. And I was just about to say that my younger brother’s learning to code, and he was familiar with the term from that, and I just thought how bizarre that it’s in both places. Yes, please.

So this boy, his father was also brilliant in mathematics, however, he was very poor and could work only as a shoemaker but he taught his son some mathematics and this son had a tutor in Latin but otherwise had no schooling taught himself Greek however and French and German and was brilliant enough to work as a teacher at 16 published some sophisticated mathematics papers in professional journals while still in his teens then was hired as a professor at Queen’s College in Cork, eventually becoming a dean at the college, a position he held until his death.

So this guy, undegreed, but universally agreed to be brilliant. So this guy’s name is George. I’ll give you his last name in a minute. His mathematical papers developed the algebraic idea that differential equations could be used to solve any mathematical problem, resulting in either the answer zero or one. And so that’s the binary language of computers beginning to form right there, although it took many more decades and the work of many others to make it happen. Additionally, his algebraic logic intended to allow putting argument and thought into logical, regular structure. And he published a paper on this in 1847. And so this is why we call things Boolean. His name was George Boole, B-O-O-L-E. And so this is why, for example, when you do a search on the Internet, you search for apples or oranges, not bananas, that or and and not, those are Boolean operators. And those come from George Boole. Those are part of his logic. And so all of this Boolean stuff comes from the work of George Boole, born in 1815, who was a brilliant autodidact.

Wow, that is fascinating. And it also sounds like the same way that you search a library catalog, like how they store library information when you’re looking for specific things.

Yep, that’s right. That’s the man. Now, obviously, like all fields, a lot of his work took time to see fruition. Other people used his work to base their work on. And obviously it’s a series of people working together over the decades and even the centuries to come to what we have now. But it’s fundamental. And his name being attached to this as Boolean is a credit to his original foundational work that he did. There’s a reason his name is attached to it, because it was so important.

Wow, that is amazing.

Yeah.

All righty. I will definitely have to look him up. I really appreciate you guys taking my call. That’s amazing information.

Thanks for calling, Grace. And good luck with your work.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

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