Google on Monday celebrated George Boole, the British mathematician’s birthday anniversary with a doodle. Boole, whose work on logic laid many of the foundations for the digital revolution, was honoured on the 200th anniversary of his birth with a special doodle.
Boole is the author of ‘The Laws of Thought’, which deals with Boolean algebra. Boole’s work has created the basis upon which digital logic, and effectively computational mathematics and the whole computing industry finds its foundation.
Monday’s doodle is in the form of a Boolean algebraic code and uses ‘AND, OR, NOT, and XOR’ symbols which are core concepts in Boolean algebra.
The first “g”, the two “o”s, the “l” and “e” in the Google logo light up based on the logic gates underneath them. When the “x” and “y” in the second “g” light up, they are on, activating other letters at different times.
For example, when both x and y are on, the first “g” (x AND y) and the second “o” (x OR y) light up.
The “XOR” gate that activates the first “o” is known as an “Exclusive OR” gate, meaning it only turns on when one and only one of x or y are true. For example, in Google, if you want to search for all Dogs, but want to keep hotdogs from your search results, then you could simply type “Dogs -hotdogs”. The – sign is the NOT operator.
George Boole, born on November 2, 1815 in the UK, was a professor of Mathematics at the University College Cork in Northern Ireland, which is also celebrating his bicentennial birth anniversary this year as well. Boole is known as the “father of the information age” because of his contributions to modern computer science through his invention of Boolean algebra.