Original subtitles

(computer animated music)

- - [Narrator] Today, everything from how we live, work,

eat, sleep, shop, to how we play, relies on mathematics.

Our desk top computers, our mobile phones,

TV, transport, any household appliance, even street lights.

Anything that uses an electrical circuit,

relies on a concept known as boolean logic.

- There isn't a piece of technology on today's planet

operating without the application of boolean logic.

- Anybody who knows anything about how computers work

knows about boolean logic.

That's sort of right down there at the basis of

modern computing.

- At the very core of a computing chip is essentially

a switch.

An on/off switch.

In today's computers it's on a silicone chip,

so you have a transistor.

- So if you're on it's 1, and off is 0,

that's all you need, and that is the amazing part of it.

Very simple.

Extraordinarily simple.

- - [Narrator] The grand designer of this elegantly

simple, but radical idea, is perhaps one of the world's

greatest unsung heroes.

- Is George Boole important?

Well, no George Boole, no Google, no Amazon, no Intel,

we could go on.

That makes him pretty important.

- Booles is the father of modern information technology.

- He was one of the first people to propose

that the way we think is by using logic.

- [Narrator] And he would do this against a backdrop

of Ireland's darkest days.

- I think the problems he was looking at were human

problems, how people live and work, and think.

And then tried to reduce that into simple rules and simple

constructs.

- [Narrator] He would even apply this approach to man's

oldest question.

- If the world work's according to fixed or given laws,

and if the human mind is part of the world,

you can not only understand the world,

but you can understand the mind of God.

- [Narrator] Nearly 200 years ago George Boole made

a revolutionary discovery.

The consequences of that discovery continue to change

our world today.

(electronic music)

- [Narrator] The Tyndall National Institute

is at the cutting edge of technology.

Technology made possible by the discoveries of George Boole.

- What we are here doing, and a number of groups

in the world are trying with us, is to try to

get computing to be faster and more efficient.

We want information to be transformed in a more efficient

way, and a safe and more secure way.

- [Narrator] Building on Boole's legacy at Cork,

Doctor Emanuele Pelucchi is part of a world-wide

team, trying to make the leap into the next technological

era.

With an advanced branch of science,

known as Quantum computing.

- There's not many places where you can get cleaner

at work than you are actually at home,

but this is one of those places where you need to

be extremely clean.

Boole is very important for our work, because

he is the person who started the mathematical tools,

which allowed to design circuits.

It's quite impressive, I'd say the reason me and all the

people here working here, is because a guy in the

middle of the 19th century formally tried to work

on something which was a big interest to a small number

of academics, and then something like 80 years later,

it became a mainstream technology.

And that is actually an extraordinary thing.

- [Narrator] The work that Emanuele is doing on

quantum computing will one day revolutionize the speeds

of which our computers work.

The applications are limitless.

Some of the most complex equations and calculations

ever devised could be solved in seconds.

- To some extent Boole is significantly less known

than other scientific heroes.

It's just not very clear how important Boole's

legacy has been, and maybe it's our job to make

it more clear, and advertise it.

- [Narrator] Every day Emanuele walks past George Boole's

home on his way to work.

- It's sometimes quite nice to think that when

you live in Cambridge, you're staying nearby the same

College where Newton was.

There's history around you, and here's the same.

- [Narrator] This 18th century house but a stone's throw

from University College Cork, has been sadly neglected

since the days when George Boole made his home here.

- Everybody who's passing by here doesn't actually know

that a lot of the technology they're using today, has it's

roots in George Boole's work.

It's a pity, we should have this house telling that,

of George Boole gave an important contribution

to our world.

- [Narrator] This year, in recognition of Boole's

importance, University College Cork,

and Cork City Council, are finally restoring the

house to it's former glory.

2015 marks the Bicentenary of Boole's birth.

And the University is pulling out all the stops,

to celebrate the event.

- And here he is, I haven't seen this before.

I hadn't heard of him, even as a student here in the 1970s

I spent six years on the campus, and I don't believe

that I heard of George Boole once during those six years.

We're using every vehicle possible to spread the message.

We've a year long series of commemorative events,

there's a whole series of lectures, we have a series

of conferences, we have a collaboration with

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exhibitions around

the world, the publication of his biography,

and the genealogy project on who he was

and who descended from him, and what they contributed

to the world.

It's a very big program.

- Who are you?

- In the flesh, history.

- Josh, thank you.

- It is a pleasure Sir, an absolute pleasure.

- Every day at about 3 o'clock there's a Boole tour.

And, he must be the tour guide.

In character.

- I first knew about Boole when I first started coming

to this campus.

Because among the things I was told, was that this

was the campus at which George Boole had worked.

Next question was, who's George Boole?

(laughs)

- We're not selling Boole.

We're sharing a story.

And we're sharing it because genius deserves

to be recognized, particularly where genius has had

such enormous impact on the lives of every single

person on the planet.

- [Narrator] This is a story about how one man sparked

a new era in human history.

- Well he's certainly relatively unknown.

I did an exercise about 18 months ago,

where I Googled Darwin, found some 16 million pages,

and I Googled Albert Einstein, and found something

in the region of 48 million.

And then I Googled George Boole, and if I recall,

I found about 430,000 pages.

- George Boole's legacy is pretty important to anyone who

regards the digital world as being fundamental

to the way in which they operate.

Without George Boole, life would be very different

for pretty well all of us.

- [Narrator] Throughout history man has been obsessed

with his place in the Universe.

- The landing gear has been moved inside, so we are

sitting on the surface.

Phil is talking to us--

- [Narrator] In 2014 the European Space Agency successfully

landed a probe on a comet in the X quadrant.

To work out the trajectories, on both the comet

and the probe ESA used a branch of maths called calculus.

Some of these calculations were based on those originally

developed by Boole.

- Well the Rosetta Space Mission is, you know,

when you think about the accuracy of what they did,

and the amount of time it took, is staggering.

We become so blase watching television, accepting

this, that, I mean, do you have any idea, how difficult

it is, to find a small object in space, and then land

on it?

Approaching with the velocity which it is moving,

I think it's fantastic.

- [Narrator] The comet will reveal new and vital research

about the birth of our solar system.

Not only has Boole's work in mathematics played a

critical part in getting the probe to the comet,

but also in how we receive the data, across 500 million

kilometers of space.

Funnily enough, the pictures they sent back to earth,

they're not pictures at all, they're just endless streams

of Boolean ones and zeroes.

When they get back to earth, they are then translated

into pictures, but they're essentially strings of

Boolean ones and zeroes that we're getting

from outer space.

- [Narrator] Boole argued that almost every value

or question could be reduced to either true or false.

A simplification of our world as a basic statement.

A yes or a no.

- Boole looked at what he called bipolarity in binary terms.

You have North and South, you have East and West,

you have male and female, you have up and down.

You have in and out.

Just, we have two states of things, and that seems to be

the basis of everything he did.

If you have just one state, you'll never get off the ground.

And if you've ten states, like we have ten fingers,

then that's too complicated, you get too many

symbols to work with.

And a computer or any other electronic device has tow states

basically on or off.

A circuit is switched on or switched off.

And the one for on, and a zero for off.

And everything is just simply a combination of those.

- [Narrator] Unlike most of the greatest scientific minds

of his time,

George Boole didn't come from a privileged background.

Perhaps that's why he chose the fledgling university

on the Southern Coast of Ireland.

A country, at the time, torn apart

by political and social upheaval.

So how did this modest young man lay the foundations

for the digital world?

It's the early 1800s, in a small village called

Broxholme in Lincolnshire resides George's father,

John Boole.

A shoe-maker by trade, but unfulfilled by his profession.

He supplements his thirst for knowledge

by studying the sciences, Mathematics and literature.

He also develops a passion for astronomy.

- I think the first thing is that it would be extraordinary

that a cobbler would be able to read and write,

because remember universe literacy is a 20th century

phenomena.

Most kids didn't go to school, or if they did,

they certainly wouldn't have picked up an awful

lot of knowledge and information.

George inherits his father's appetite for knowledge,

to understand our place in the universe.

- George Boole and his father built their own telescope

and they would invite the neighbours in to look at the

wonders of the heavens, but only if they looked to

the heavens in a righteous manner, and they worshiped God.

He was putting his beliefs into action.

I think his father was a frustrated scientist.

He would have liked to have been a scientist,

but like George he didn't have any formal education,

but he wasn't in a position.

He had a family, he had four children,

he had a wife to look after.

So he wasn't in a position to actually pursue

his love of science.

- [Narrator] Whilst struggling just to keep his business

afloat, George's father dedicates every spare

moment he has to supplementing and encouraging

his son's prodigious talent.

George also is an irrepressible student,

having mastered more than five languages.

A 14 year old George translates the Greek poem

Ode to Spring into English.

His proud father submits it to the local paper.

- And this caused a great deal of controversy,

because people wrote in saying, you know,

I don't think a boy of 12 could have actually done this,

and he had to write letters back and his father wrote,

yes, this is the unaided work of a 12 year old.

So I think at that stage, people realized that they

had a young genius living among them.

- [Narrator] Two centuries later, Boole's legacy can be

seen in other prodigious young minds.

Coding clubs, like Coder Dojo, founded in Cork in 2011,

are being set up all over the world,

to help children develop their computing skills.

- [Girl] Yeah, well done.

- [Teacher] Alright guys we're setting up a quick

instruction talk.

Who hasn't been here before, who hasn't been to

Coder Dojo yet?

- [Narrator] Members devise their own computer games,

create their own animations, and learn how to use

digital technology creatively.

- One of the things that made Boole so powerful,

was that he studied so many languages,

that he was able to read the primary source texts,

of all the mathematical theories of the time,

in all the different languages they were written in.

And facility with languages, that neuroplasticity

is incredibly important.

As these kids learn more and more languages,

they get more and more fluent, and they think

more powerfully.

And I have to say, the best coders are poets.

They combine creativity and economy expression

in language.

That talent and that skill needs to be built young

for it to flourish.

And I think the more you build it, the more powerful

and more creative you can become.

What we know is that when you get creative,

you build that muscle of computational thinking.

It can take you to unimaginably amazing places.

And I'm sure that Boole would have been a programmer.

Were he here today.

- [Narrator] John Boole, distracted perhaps

by his intellectual pursuits, loses his business.

And young George, is forced to become the sole

bread-winner for the family, as a school teacher.

Despite this, he dedicated every breathing moment

to mathematics, and in particular, to a branch of maths

known as calculus.

- Yeah you know every high school student in the States

just looks forward to doing calculus, and here's a guy

who never even actually formally went to school,

inventing things in it.

I'm thinking when my kids get to high school,

will I have to re-learn it.

It's hard, it's not intuitive.

It's not something that you go out every day

and see and touch, it's really very academic.

- [Narrator] Retired maths professor Des MacHale

is Boole's biographer.

And has spent the last 50 years studying the logicians

life and work.

- Boole's equation was X squared equals x,

I'm looking at the equation x to the 7th equals x.

And I'm looking for easy proofs of results that would

follow from that.

Just for fun.

- [Unidentified Interviewer] You actually love doing

this stuff?

- Oh I do, absolutely yeah, this is my hobby.

And you know if you make your whole career in mathematics

you've got to like doing this stuff, I mean, you know,

you say to me would you prefer to go to a good movie,

or do mathematics, well,

Mathematics is experimental science, and you put

95% of what you do into the waste paper bin for recycling.

But it's the 5% that remains that's good.

It's like, mining for gold.

It's like a game, I suppose, like a computer game

you play where yo press the buttons and you know

what to do, and it's very much in the spirit of

what Boole did.

- [Narrator] By his twenties, while still working

as a school teacher, Boole manages to find time,

to research and publish over 50 papers on calculus.

One of which, wins a gold medal from the

Royal Society in London.

And then Boole develops a new branch of mathematics.

Invariant theory.

- Invariant theory asked the question, if you have an object

in mathematics, and you perform a mathematical

transformation on that object, what stays the same,

and what changes?

So a good elementary example would be, if you take a circle,

and you take its center, you rotate the circle,

well then all the points of the circumference

of the circle move, but the center stayed the same.

That is an invariant of that particular transformation.

To actually come along and invent a whole new

area of mathematics, is quite an extraordinary thing to do,

and especially for a, let's say 25 year old student

who was self-educated in mathematics, to do this

is unbelievably, it's preposterous,

that one could actually do it.

- He was a mathematical savant, just one of these people

who have a deep curiosity and just a phenomenal

capacity to learn, and also a curiosity and

an ability to invent.

Because see a lot of what he's doing, he's inventing things.

He's discovering and inventing new languages

that can describe things in a mathematical way.

- [Narrator] Invariant Theory was not fully appreciated

in Boole's lifetime.

But 70 years later, Albert Einstein uses it

to develop his own theory.

- It also became important in physics.

Because in physics you ask the question what stays

the same, what's the big invariant in physics?

And it's C, which is the velocity of light.

- [Narrator] Without Boole's work on invariance,

Einstein's theory of relativity

might never have been discovered.

- I think that he investigated and did discovery

in the area of Invariant theory,

and it's a very important line of mathematics,

which then has a link into some of the work

that was done with, in relativity, and atomic physics.

So again you have this person, just playing in an

area, coming up with a language that helps describe

something, and that language gets used elsewhere.

- [Narrator] Condemned to being the sole provider

for his parents, sister, and two young brothers,

on a modest teacher's salary.

The prospect of improving his situation with a

University education, seemed beyond his reach.

- It cost a lot of money, to get a third level education

or degree in the 19th Century.

He didn't have money like that, and even if he did,

he probably couldn't have done it, because he had

to support his family at the same time.

But thanks to his prestigious award by the Royal Society

Boole's work is beginning to be recognized.

In 1839, he's offered a place at Cambridge University.

But there's a problem.

- George Boole was an outsider.

He was an academic outsider, he was also

a social outsider, in that, you know, you don't mix

in the high social circles,

if you don't have very much money.

The outsiders are the poor or the working classes,

just were not part of what was going on

in the academic world that belonged to universities

where there was privilege and where the people who

went there, actually from privileged and rich backgrounds.

So Boole had to fight against this all his life.

- [Narrator] Financial considerations forced Boole

to turn the offer down.

- Boole, I think, did actually want to go to Cambridge.

But there was no mechanism whereby a person without

any money or a fellowship or a scholarship,

could have actually gone.

But on the other hand, in later life,

he said look, maybe I'm just as well not to have gone

to Cambridge.

If I went to Cambridge, I would just go to lectures,

I would just pick up the information,

and the material, that other people had taught,

and I would then reproduce that and maybe extend that.

He certainly would not have gone off in a radical

direction in mathematics, or logic.

I mean his strong suit was creativity.

- [Narrator] Now aged 25, it looks like Boole will be

destined to live out his life in obscurity.

But ten years later, he gets a second chance.

In 1849 a new University College is opened in Cork.

This college is seeking professors.

Boole decides to apply.

Since he has no academic qualifications, he asks for

letters of recommendation from some of the most

prominent members of the scientific community.

- Boole had some very acceptable letters of recommendation

from eminent mathematicians, of the day in the

United Kingdom.

The foremost probably was Lord Kelvin, William Thompson,

and he was one of the foremost mathematicians of the day.

Also Augustus De Morgan, who was a professor

at London University, Phillip Kelland, Robert Ellis,

names that everybody in mathematics would have known.

- I have carefully examined all that Mr Boole has written,

and have no hesitation in assigning him a place

amongst the very foremost rank of the mathematicians.

- I have much pleasure in stating that Mr Boole's earlier

contribution to the Cambridge mathematical journey

of which I was for some time the editor,

convinced me that his mathematical abilities, are quite

of the first order.

- Mr Boole of Lincoln has established a high reputation

amongst mathematicians.

His appointment to such a situation, would be

highly desirable for the sake of science.

- [Narrator] In the Autumn of 1849, a still relatively

fresh faced young man, sets foot in the quadrangle

of Queens College Cork for the very first time.

At 35 years of age, George Boole has become the college's

first ever Professor of mathematics.

- He would have come up the avenue, and entered through

the archway.

The teaching rooms are on the far side, and his office

would have been over there.

But let's face it, in 1849 Ireland wasn't an attractive

place to move to for a job.

And Boole came here admittedly without a college degree,

but he has his Gold Medal from the Royal Society,

and he had the most wonderful set of references

from some of the best mathematicians in Europe.

So I think that most people saw that this guy

was arriving with the capacity to contribute,

uniquely to the intellect of the university,

and in a discipline critical to economic and social

development here.

There were only 100, or 120 students, and at this time,

only 20 teaching staff had been recruited.

So, he was coming to a small town, in very poor economic

and social shape, to a totally new institution, without

any reputation, and into a small, very small community,

of scholars.

I suppose it was the perfect fit for Boole

for a number of reasons.

The key one for him was that it gave him a job,

with a salary at a level that he needed.

Particularly to support his very poor family,

back in Lincoln.

Perhaps it also gave him the opportunity to be a big fish

in a small pond.

And it also, because of the small scale,

probably gave him more time to think than he would have had

in a large, busy, well-established University.

- I was lucky enough to inherit his title as

Associate Professor of Mathematics.

And I'm not worthy of that, but it is a very great honor

to say well, I have the same title as George Boole

had here.

- [Narrator] Boole now had access to a well-stocked library.

Stimulating research from the continent,

at his fingertips.

- Natural science, in French.

Oh, oh, oh, there they are, there they are.

This is the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics,

produced in Oxford, sold as the fist volume, Volume one.

So he'd have ordered that when it came out first.

1861, still valid.

This is valid mathematics.

And I mean they have, the most beautiful pictures

here, the most beautiful illustrations of curves.

These are all done as wood cuts.

He would have felt they were worth ordering for the

library, and would have actually had them bound,

and they come here and they be available for students

to read.

It's very nice.

He certainly would have handled this,

so these would have been his books.

It shows here the College was fairly well stocked

with research journals.

- [Narrator] Boole leaves his family behind in Lincoln,

and for the first time, concentrates fully on his research.

This move to Cork, will prove to be a turning point.

- I sometimes wonder why George Boole would go

to a University in Cork, which at the time,

was relatively new, so it wasn't on the Academic map.

So, but I think that a University like that can give you

a lot of intellectual freedom.

If you go to some of the more established Universities,

sometimes you have to follow a certain line of thinking.

Maybe 20 years later you get to go and do your own

thing, whereas I think University County Cork,

Queens University Cork, gave him that opportunity

to be able to explore multiple things,

and I think if you look at what he was doing,

it was so unique.

- [Narrator] Here in Cork, Boole comes up with an idea

that will change the world.

- Sometimes I get asked by people, could you describe

the essence of what Boole did.

What was his major achievement, and also what's it about,

what's it got to do with me?

And I would say, he reduced basic ideas into

algebraic symbols, and they were very simple

algebraic symbols.

But to write them down in symbolic form,

was a masterpiece.

Boolean Logic now looks like an obvious idea,

but it takes a genius to spot an obvious idea.

I mean Newton is regarded as a genius,

because of the story of the apple, he saw an apple fall

from a tree and asked what made it fall down.

Now apples have been galling from trees

from tens of thousands of years before that,

but no-body ever said, hang on, what's making that apple

fall down, or why does the force of gravity work?

So I think it takes great genius to spot a very obvious

thing, and ask the obvious question.

- [Narrator] So how does the mind of a genius work?

For Boole, the process of discovery is triggered

by his new life, and the circumstance in which he

now finds himself.

- Paradoxically when he came to Cork, he did mix

with the higher clergy with the Bishop of Cork,

and his judges and various other people.

I think, so he felt at this stage, maybe I should

move up a little in the social scale, not for nasty reasons,

but I will be more effective, I'll be able to do more,

if I'm actually mixing with these people.

Because these are the people with power,

these are the people of authority.

- [Narrator] But although Boole now mixes with a higher

class of society,

he never feels quite comfortable.

Especially given what is happening outside the

University walls.

Ireland in 1849 is a country in a state of despair.

The Potato Blight reduces the population by two fifths.

Over one million people are thought to have died,

many more are emigrating.

County Cork in particular, is exceptionally deprived.

- Social conditions in this city, were very bad

at that time.

There were significant social, economic,

and health challenges.

In fact in that year, Queen Victoria came to visit Cork

and originally intended to open the University,

but couldn't come on campus, because we had cholera here.

- [Narrator] As a man who had known poverty,

Boole empathized with the victims of the famine.

In a letter to his sister Mary Anne, he makes his

feelings clear.

- Over the country you see utter destitution,

nothing but fields overgrown with weeds.

Vast desolate bogs, cabins few in numbers,

I've seen nothing like it.

It is impossible to relieve this wretchedness

by any private efforts.

The sight of it is heart-sickening.

- [Narrator] But Boole isn't content

just to wring his hands.

He wants to understand the reasons for this crisis.

- George Boole lived in Ireland at a time of great stress

and distress, and the Irish famine happened when he

was there, west Cork was an area that was particularly

badly hit, and I think there was a lot of,

just broken logic.

You know, we had lots of food,

the food was leaving the country, as people were dying.

People were leaving the country, and emigrating to

places like the US, and yet there was fish in the ocean,

fish in the rivers,

corn in the fields.

And that's illogical.

- [Narrator] Trying to establish the causes

of the Irish famine is the first trigger to stimulate

Boole's thought process.

The second, arises out of his mastery

of several different languages.

- As you try to learn different languages, you try

to look for a pattern, and things that are common

between the languages, because it helps you learn,

helps you learn more quickly.

So my sense is, it really enabled him to go to the

root of what's common between a language.

Which then is also, well what's common between

logical thinking.

- [Narrator] In his attempt to understand the causes

of Ireland's social ills,

and in his quest to discover a common

denominator for language, Boole is setting

himself immense problems.

But these are nothing compared to the third

and greatest task upon which he now embarked.

To prove the existence of God.

- Boole was a deeply religious man.

I think Boole was very keen on the idea of the

oneness of God, which clashes somewhat with a Christian

idea of the Trinity.

- [Narrator] Boole's originality of thought,

is at it's most evident in his approach to religion.

Which is deliberately non-denominational.

- In Ireland he attended his local Church of

Ireland parish church, where he was a regular

at evensong.

But he also attended the Unitarian Church, but he never

became a full member of either.

- [Narrator] Boole is convinced that God is one being.

And he seeks to prove this by applying to the Bible,

the process of logical analysis.

- Boole was very suspicious of any doctrinal statements,

any form of organized religion.

Boole's religious motivations were to strip away

the layers of interpretation,

and get back to the pure religion, to the oneness

to the unity of God to a religion free of interpretation.

- [Narrator] Doctor Mark Hocknell is at the

Royal Society in London to look through the Boole archives.

Here, we have a note in Boole's handwriting,

and it's headed the origin of evil.

For a philosopher of religion it's really interesting.

He starts with four logical ideas, four premises.

He says if God is omnipotent, all things must take

place according to his will and vice versa.

Second, he says If God is perfectly good, and if all

things take place according to his will, absolute evil

does not exist.

And then the third premise, if God were omnipotent and

benevolence were the sole principle of his conduct,

then pain could not exist,

and it must exist only as an instrument of God.

Fourth premise, pain does exist.

And then in the rest of this paper, he subjects those

four statements to a rigorous logical analysis.

And you get the sense that he's thinking

as he's writing.

This is raw thought coming out,

you can see the way he's crossed things out

where he thinks he's made a mistake.

And he's written things in again.

So this is a glimpse into the mind of Boole.

We're actually seeing the thoughts going through

his mind and being committed to paper, as it's actually

happening, and that's very exciting.

He gets to his conclusion, just by manipulating

the symbols that he's coded up.

So he treats the problem as if it were a logical problem

or as if it were a mathematical problem.

He combines them in lots of different ways.

So he adds them, subtracts them, he multiplies them,

and so when combinations of symbols are shown to be

equivalent, he just eliminates them from the equation.

And he's left with the symbols that tell him,

absolute evil does not exist and pain is an instrument

of good.

If you can understand the world, if the world is

rational and the world works according to fixed or

given laws, and if the human mind is part of the world,

it, therefore, works according to fixed given rational

laws, you can not only understand the world,

but you can understand the mind of God.

- [Narrator] Boole never did prove the existence of God.

But the attempt to do so,

will eventually lead him to make his greatest discovery.

- People have this misconception that science is about

proving things.

And actually, it's the exact opposite.

You have a hypotheses, and you try to falsify it.

You try to disprove stuff,

that's what science can do.

- I think what it shows is curiosity.

He was looking at taking big problems,

complex things that people debate and argue about,

and then try to create a simple order around it.

- [Narrator] George Boole marries educationalist

Mary Everest, whose uncle is the surveyor general

of India, and gives his name to the world's highest

mountain.

They have five daughters.

All proved to be gifted in mathematics, chemistry,

and literature.

In 1854 Boole publishes his masterpiece.

The Laws of Thought.

This work will be his crowning achievement.

But it will be another 80 years before its implications

are realized.

- Did he know how his research was going to be applied?

Not for one moment do I think so.

I think what might have disappointed him,

is how long it took, before it was applied.

- [Narrator] In 1937, a 21 year old American Master's degree

student at MIT, makes a staggering discovery.

Claude Shannon, is studying electrical engineering,

and stumbles across an 83 year old book written by

a unknown Professor of Mathematics from Cork.

He realizes that Boole's 19th century research

can be applied to 20th Century technology.

- So what Shannon did, was to find a way of implementing

the logic, that Boole and others had developed,

into a simple circuit.

Showing that you can automatize operations that were before

by in person.

Before it was a person switching telephone calls.

It was a lady, which would say, oh you want to connect

to this person, pop.

And it was a lady doing this.

But you can do, this is a logic operation, you receive a

request, I want this, and you apply it.

So what Shannon showed that you can do this

with relays at the time, and the modern version of relays,

is the transistor, so it's actually the same thing.

It made it automatic, and making it automatic,

makes it fast, cheap, more reliable, stunningly better,

- [Narrator] Switching circuits are at the heart of the

telephone industry.

Shannon proves that Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic

can be used to simplify the arrangement for

electro-mechanical relays.

- I think what he stumbled on and uncovered,

was, by using Boolean algebra, you can now actually

start to build, back in those days,

the telecom industry.

Start to build networking, and switching,

and create bigger and bigger systems,

and I think that link, that's a very important bridge,

from a mathematical world,

into essentially a computer design world.

I think he was the guy that made that bridge,

and made the connection that I can actually design big

things using these logical expressions.

- [Narrator] Over the last century, companies like Intel

have made staggering improvements to the design

of circuit boards.

- This is one of our validation labs.

We spend years developing a micro processor.

It's one of the most complex machines man's ever made.

Today, the most advanced silicon chips on earth,

still rely on Boole's basic laws on logic.

- This is called an AND gate, right and then

we have like an input, or two inputs,

and an output, and you can draw a very simple table

that describes how an AND gate works.

And then you would know that if you put a logical zero,

on each one of these inputs, the output of this device

would just be a zero.

If you have the input of a zero one,

the AND gate will always put out a zero,

and the opposite is true if you put an input of one

on A and zero on B, you still get a Zero.

And then with this particular one if you put

two ones on the input, you get a one on the output.

And that's Boolean logic.

And all a micro processor is, is combining together

gates like this, in such a way, that it can solve

math problems.

We're working on chips that have billions and billions

of transistors on it.

And getting all of these elements to work together

in harmony, is very challenging.

- [Narrator] And the miniaturization of silicon technology,

has led to giant leaps forward,

throughout the computer industry.

- What I've got in my hand, is a micro processor.

It'll be going out to market in the second half of

2015.

It's got more transistors in it, than the number

of people in our planet.

And the computing power in this chip is equal

to 3 teraflops.

To give you an idea of what that is,

ten years ago it would take a room as big

as the room you're in, to generate 1 teraflop of computing.

Today I can hold it in my hand.

The design methodology needed to do something like this,

it comes completely reliant on the mathematics

that George Boole invented in the 19th Century.

- [Narrator] But the application of Boolean logic

is about much more than just computer technology.

From their earliest days, the internet giants

have been explicit, that they are not just search

engine corporations.

They are pioneers in artificial intelligence.

- If you do a Google search, most people are just interested

in finding documents that have all of the words

that they type in.

So implicitly they're saying, I want documents that contain

the and of these words.

But you can also put in things that contain the or,

so I could for example type in something,

say someone documents the name Hinton, and they contain,

either Geoff or Geoffrey, and that would be a better search

for me if I wanted to find everything about me.

The or would be a Boolean or there, and Google makes

that available.

- [Narrator] Professor Hinton is perhaps the world's

leading expert on neural network systems.

An artificial intelligence technique that he developed

in the mid 1980s.

Not only is he working on the science of

decision making, but he's also a descendant of George Boole.

- I am actually related to George Boole.

I'm his great, great grand son.

I think Boole, particularly in his later life,

wanted to understand how thought worked,

and that's still one of the most fascinating

scientific problems.

And it's obviously got huge pay offs.

In particular it's got big payoffs for Google,

because if they could understand how thoughts

are working in documents, they would be able to

give you the document you really want.

If we could get things that understood,

and that can do perception, and can understand

reason, there would be basically no limit

to what we could do.

- [Narrator] Understanding how the human mind works,

and how we make decisions, is now a

trillion dollar industry.

And artificial intelligence, is the pinnacle of

Boole's legacy to the digital age.

- Boole was really interested in decision making.

And trying to understand how decisions can be made.

And, we're still chasing that exact same question.

- [Narrator] At the core of artificial intelligence,

is Boole's most important principle.

That even complex decision making can be broken down

into a simple set of rules.

- This is a ball.

What is this?

- [Eyecub] Ball.

- [Narrator] This robot is designed to learn in the same

way a child does.

- This is a tractor.

Where is the tractor?

We use eyecub to replicate a wide variety of child

psychology experiments.

- No, that's the cup.

And hopefully when we're doing it right, we get data

that matches what children do and how children learn.

In a neuron network you have lots of neurons,

just in our brain.

And in the computer we simulate this,

so we have lots of artificial neurons

in our neuron network.

Those connections form pathways through the system,

so the more often a particular path is walked,

the wider that path becomes.

You know what fires together wires together.

Where is the tractor?

Where is the tractor?

Very good.

- [Narrator] Eyecub has never seen these objects,

or heard these words before.

This is a huge milestone in the world of AI.

- This is a box.

What is this?

- [Eyecub] Box

- [Narrator] But can a robot actually think by itself?

- This is a block.

What is this?

- [Eyecub] Box.

- This is a block.

What is this?

- [Eyecub] Block.

- What is this?

- [Eyecub] Block.

- This is a box.

What is this?

- [Eyecub] Box.

- What is this?

- [Eyecub] Block.

- What is this?

- [Eyecub] Box.

- Hide the block.

What we want is for you to be able to tell Eyecub

to do something new, teach it exactly how you

would teach another person.

We can teach Eyecub new skills and new tasks, not by

reprogramming Eyecub.

Not by coming up with a new set of rules,

by which it's decisions are going to be made.

But by giving it the right kinds of experience.

By interacting with it, talking to it.

Well done Eyecub.

So that's decision making.

It might seem like a really trivial experiment,

placing a cup over a block, but the implications

of it are amazing.

- [Narrator] It might not be long before the unimaginable

becomes imaginable.

And this, is all based on the work of George Boole.

- You know, the son of cobblers can do great thing

if you put them in the right environment,

and he's one of those folks, that, rare birds,

but they can do wonderful things.

- [Narrator] Without his work on calculus projects of

this magnitude, would never have even been considered.

(loud applause)

- If you want to send a rocket off into space,

you want to send a rocket off to the moon,

everybody talks about the physics,

everyone talks about the engineering,

and they're wonderful things.

But almost nobody talks about the original mathematics

that plots out the paths of trajectories.

- [Narrator] His work on Invariance was so advanced,

that it would inspire the greatest minds for centuries

to come.

- Even Higs Bolton comes from those type of ideas.

- [Narrator] But his need to interrogate the status quo,

his search for rules in the most unlikely of places,

will remain his ever-lasting legacy.

- I believe that Boole worshiped truth above everything

else.

So no matter who says something, and no matter who's

famous, it's the truth of the material

that they actually put forward, that really counts.

- In many ways the simplest ideas are the best,

and that's an idea that runs through not just

mathematics, but the history of science.

- Did Boole move us from the Industrial Age

into the Digital Age?

Very probably.

I don't think he intended to do this, but of course

through the work of people who followed him,

and people who picked up his ideas,

we did move from an industrial age, a mechanical age,

as it were,

into a digital age.

- I think George Boole's story's got a lot going for it.

His career, the shifts and changes that he went through.

Most of all, I think he may have the worst ending,

of anybody I have ever come across.

- He walked to teach in one of these rooms one morning,

in 1864, in November.

Got drenched, because he lived about two and a half miles

from the campus.

He taught all day, in his wet clothes,

and walked home, and developed pneumonia.

- [Narrator] Boole's condition deteriorated.

And on the 8th December 1864, he died.

He was 49.

- There are stories to the effect that his death

was hastened by his wife, because she was interested

in homeopathy.

- She was a health nut, and she believed that he had,

obviously had pneumonia of some sort.

She believed that by wrapping him in freezing cold sheets,

she could get rid of his, and plunging him into

cold baths, she could get rid of his pneumonia.

- It is said that she insisted on either throwing

water on his bed, or at least ensuring that he was

lying between wet blankets.

I suspect that such treatment probably would have

hastened his demise.

But pneumonia.

After a wetting.

Very sad.

- [Narrator] Mary Everest Boole and her five daughters

continued to honour his memory for the rest of their lives.

His memorial can be found where it should be,

at University College Cork.

- This is the Boole window in the east wing

of the University College Cork.

It is Boole in the center there at the bottom,

and he's writing in a book.

And he's surrounded by famous people.

You get Pascale, you get Leibniz, the inventor of Calculus,

and you've got Copernicus to represent astronomy,

on this side there, and Galileo.

You can see Archimedes with the geometric compass

in his hand, and of course Newton here.

You have the english Mathematicians there,

are Newton, Napier, and Bacon.

They were the two inventors of calculus of course, Newton

and Leibniz, and Boole was a great follower of calculus.

They are some of the most famous people of all time,

that you've got there.

So it's a rather splendid window.

It was certainly chosen by someone who knew Boole

and knew his background, and knew the people that

he would have been impressed by.

- Boole's work was irrelevant in his time.

It was irrelevant for a century thereafter.

You can't predict, the outcome, or the impact of research.

And we must always support blue skies thinking,

curiosity driven research.

Or we will eliminate Boole's from our universities today.

- The digital world is quite clearly in its infancy.

And I think that industries at that point in the development

in their infancy, struggle to look back, to look and begin

to investigate where they came from.

It kind of isn't the issue.

Only when they mature and grow up,

and reflect, do they begin to look back,

and look at their own heroes and find their own heroes.

And I think this is true of almost every industry.

Eventually the digital world will unquestionably

start to look at it's heroes, and will discover

that George Boole was not just a hero, maybe the hero.

(Closing Credits)