Augustus De Morgan, (born June 27, 1806, Madura, Indiadied March 18, 1871, London,

Eng.), English mathematician and logician whose major contributions to the study
of logic include the formulation ofDe Morgans laws and work leading to the development of the
theory of relations and the rise of modern symbolic, or mathematical, logic.
De Morgan was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1828 he became professor
of mathematics at the newly established University College in London, where, except for a
period of five years (183136), he taught until 1866, when he helped found and became the first
president of the London Mathematical Society. One of his earliest works, Elements of
Arithmetic (1830), was distinguished by a simple yet thorough philosophical treatment of the
ideas of number and magnitude. In 1838 he introduced and defined the term mathematical
induction to describe the process that until then had been used with little clarity in mathematical
proofs.
De Morgan was among the Cambridge mathematicians who recognized the purely symbolic
nature ofalgebra, and he was aware of the possibility of algebras that differ from ordinary
algebra. In hisTrigonometry and Double Algebra (1849) he gave a geometric interpretation of the
properties of complex numbers (numbers involving a term with a factor of the square root of
minus one) that suggested the idea of quaternions. He made a useful contribution to
mathematical symbolism by proposing the use of the solidus (oblique stroke) for the printing
of fractions.
The laws that bear De Morgans name are a pair of dually related theorems that make possible
the transformation of statements and formulas into alternate, and often more convenient, forms.
Known verbally by William of Ockham in the 14th century, the laws were investigated
thoroughly and expressed mathematically by De Morgan. The laws are: (1) the negation (or
contradictory) of a disjunction is equal to the conjunction of the negation of the alternatesthat
is, not (p or q) equals not p and not q, or symbolically (p q) pq; and (2) the negation
of a conjunction is equal to the disjunction of the negation of the original conjunctsthat is, not
(p and q) equals not p or not q, or symbolically (pq) p q.
Asserting that logic as it had come down from Aristotle was unnecessarily restricted in scope, De
Morgan made his greatest contributions as a reformer of logic. The renaissance of logic studies,
which began in the first half of the 19th century, came about almost entirely because of the

writings of De Morgan and another British mathematician, George Boole. Alternate forms and
generalizations of De Morgan laws exist in various branches of mathematics.

George Boole (1815 - 1864)

The original Working Class Boy Made Good, Boole was born in the wrong time, in the wrong
place, and definitely in the wrong class - he didn't have a hope of growing up to be a
mathematical genius, but he did it anyway.
Born in the English industrial town of Lincoln, Boole was lucky enough to have a father who
passed along his own love of math. Young George took to learning like a politician to a pay rise
and, by the age of eight, had outgrown his father's self-taught limits.
A family friend stepped in to teach the boy basic Latin, and was exhausted within a few years.
Boole was translating Latin poetry by the age of twelve. By the time he hit puberty, the
adolescent George was fluent in German, Italian and French. At 16 he became an assistant
teacher, at 20 he opened his own school.
Over the next few years, depending mainly on mathematical journals borrowed from the local
Mechanic's Institute, Boole struggled with Isaac Newton's 'Principia' and the works of 18th and
19th century French mathematicians Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. He had
soon mastered the most intricate mathematical principles of his day.
It was time to move on.
At the age of 24, George Boole published his first paper ('Researches on the Theory of Analytical
Transformations') in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. Over the next ten years, his star rose
as a steady stream of original articles began to push the limits of mathematics.
By 1844 he was concentrating on the uses of combined algebra and calculus to process infinitely
small and large figures, and, in that same year, received a Royal Society medal for his
contributions to analysis.
Boole soon began to see the possibilities for applying his algebra to the solution of logical
problems. Boole's 1847 work, 'The Mathematical Analysis of Logic', not only expanded
on Gottfried Leibniz' earlier speculations on the correlation between logic and math, but argued
that logic was principally a discipline of mathematics, rather than philosophy.
It was this paper that won him, not only the admiration of the distinguished logician Augustus de
Morgan (a mentor of Ada Byron's), but a place on the faculty of Ireland's Queen's College.
....................

Without a school to run, Boole began to delve deeper into his own work, concentrating on
refining his 'Mathematical Analysis', and determined to find a way to encode logical arguments
into an indicative language that could be manipulated and solved mathematically.
He came up with a type of linguistic algebra, the three most basic operations of which were (and
still are) AND, OR and NOT. It was these three functions that formed the basis of his premise,
and were the only operations necessary to perform comparisons or basic mathematical functions.
Boole's system (detailed in his 'An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded
the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities', 1854) was based on a binary
approach, processing only two objects - the yes-no, true-false, on-off, zero-one approach.
Surprisingly, given his standing in the academic community, Boole's idea was either criticised or
completely ignored by the majority of his peers. Luckily, American logician Charles Sanders
Peirce was more open-minded.
Twelve years after Boole's 'Investigation' was published, Pierce gave a brief speech describing
Boole's idea to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences - and then spent more than 20 years
modifying and expanding it, realising the potential for use in electronic circuitry and eventually
designing a fundamental electrical logic circuit.
Pierce never actually built his theoretical logic circuit, being himself more of a logician than an
electrician, but he did introduce boolean algebra into his university logic philosophy courses.
Eventually, one bright student - Claude Shannon - picked up the idea and ran with it.
....................
Boole published a number of papers following his 'Investigation', the two most influential
probably being a 'Treatise on Differential Equations' (1859) and 'Treatise on the Calculus of
Finite Differences' (1860).
Unfortunately, Boole's life was cut short when he died of a 'feverish cold' at the age of 49, after
walking 2 miles through the rain to get to class and then lecturing in wet clothes (proving, once
again, that genius and common sense sometimes have a less than nodding acquaintance).
....................
With George Boole's 'Mathematical Analysis' and 'Investigation', boolean algebra, sometimes
known as boolean logic, came into being.
His two value system, separating arguments into different classes which can then be processed
according to the presence or absence of a certain property, enabled any proposition - regardless
of the number of individual items - to draw logical conclusions.
Boole's texts led to the development of applications he could never have imagined.