Boole's Law of Thought
Boolean logic is an integral part of the keyword searching that is used to discover library resources in catalogs and databases. In this work, George Boole outlines his system for expressing logical problems as equations, similar to algebra. At the time of publication, Boole was a professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork, in Ireland. While many other systems for symbolic logic were developed before and after Boole’s, his algebra became associated with the development of digital computers through the concept of a logic gate that dictates how basic electronic circuitry behaves. The main Boolean operators that libraries still use are AND for conjunction, OR for disjunction, and NOT for negation.
George Boole (1815-1864).
Collected Logical Works. Chicago: Open Court Pub. Company, 1940.
Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/asa/Record/205627
A version of this text has been digitized and is available through the Internet Archive.