Talk:George Boole/Archive 1

Hinton children
William Hinton and Joan Hinton link to others by the same name, whose father was Sebastian not Charles. Accordingly I unlinked them. &mdash;Tamfang 04:03, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Someone has 'adulterated' this article and needs to be fixed.


 * Oh, come now! I know you feel strongly about the sanctity of Wikipedia, but surely that doesn't require castration?

comments
This article needs cleaned up --Gantlord 10:02, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

it appears part of the biography has been deleted. 166.66.108.117 13:46, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Fixed now. Thanks xC | ☎  13:51, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

What happened?
What happened to this article? At least it used to have paragraphs. Now it looks like someone's homework project pasted into the box with no breaks or links.Furby100 11:43, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I fixed it. If you want to find out what happened to an article, the 'history' is a good place to start :) ssepp(talk) 12:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Shannon and Boole
I've heard that either Shannon's adviser or one of his teachers not only knew Boolean logic, but in fact would have studied with Boole himself, or something like that. This is much stronger then just Shannon going to a normal class and meeting Boolean logic by chance... Does anybody have information regarding Shannon's adviser? -- NIC1138 (talk) 05:07, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Mary Everest Boole?
I have some evidence that the names of the Boole children may be mixed up. You have Lucy Everest and Mary Ellen. But Mary Boole's Gutenberg listing is "Mary Everest Boole". http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13447 If you look at the publishing information in the PDF file of the one book listed there you will see that it discusses a host of books written and published by the same Mary Everest Boole. It also looks like she was notable in her own right and not just through her father and husband. Trilobitealive (talk) 16:38, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Here is another link supporting the notability assertion. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=MARY+EVEREST+BOOLE&x=13&y=20 Trilobitealive (talk) 16:42, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Time in Liverpool
It seems likely that Boole's time in Liverpool teaching was at the school of William Marrat: the date 1833 is compatible with Marrat's movements as shown in the ODNB. But right now I don't have a really good reference for this: there are quite a few hints on the Web, but it feels a bit like OR without a solid reference. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:16, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Blatant plagiarism
The biography was directly copied from this page- the only changes were rewordings by other people. This must be fixed. I might do this in my free time later, but some help would be amazing.   Awesomeness  talk  21:48, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I wonder if that might be a mirror site or "borrowed" from Wikipedia? I know I've seen articles that I wrote nearly singlehandedly appear in really odd places. Since this article was started in 2002 and written organically by multiple editors I'd suspect that might be the case. Trilobitealive (talk) 00:28, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 * If you search for the phrase "The personal character of Boole inspired all his friends with the deepest esteem" you'll see this is prose from 1880. Typically such old-style prose is from some public domain source. Certainly NNDB often mirrors WP, too. Here use of PD text should be attributed. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:20, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Indian logic
I don't see any evidence that Boole was influenced by Indian logic, other than the testimony of his wife. There was information available at the time through H. T. Colebrooke's work; George Peacock is said to have taken notice; and Boole was very much a follower of Peacock. That's as far as it goes, without further sources. Charles Matthews (talk) 12:02, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Assessment
Easily a 'B' in all the projects. Nominated for GA status too.--Robert EA Harvey (talk) 15:29, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Boole and Dreamweaver
Can anyone explain succinctly how George Boole has ended up having a data type named after him? http://help.adobe.com/en_US/dreamweaver/cs/using/WScbb6b82af5544594822510a94ae8d65-7aa3a.html And what this really means? Or is it impossible to be succinct about this? The Boolean Algebra page is too technical (and long) for someone like me. ixo (talk) 13:20, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Boolean Algebra is about ideas, items, things that can only take either of two values: often called True or False. Many computer languages store a type of variable that can only take two states, 1 or 0; on or off.  These are frequently described with some variant of George's name.  --Robert EA Harvey (talk) 16:22, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Overstatement
The statement "Boolean algebra, which is the basis of all modern computer arithmetic" is an overstatement. Boolean algebra is used when computers employ logic, and Boole deserves credit for that, but computer ARITHMETIC is based on the binary number system, which was invented by Leibniz nearly a century and a half before Boole's work. CharlesTheBold (talk) 02:08, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
 * What reword would you recommend? Guliolopez (talk) 18:17, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Boolean logic and the use of the binary system to do arithmetic are intimately related. It's not an overstatement... -- NIC1138 (talk) 04:54, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I would say "Boolean algebra, which is the basis of all modern computer logic", and let Leibniz have the credit for the binary system and arithmetic. The logic and arithmetic are both crucial, and I agree that they are closely related. CharlesTheBold (talk) 12:07, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Boole's logic goes further. It covers full truth tables and complete operators, XOR NOR etc. It is a Godel logic of the first type; all assertions are provable from the axioms. Some of the finer points of modern computing, such as the twos-complement format, were developed by von Neuman when he worked for IBM in the 1940s and 50s. The idea of algorithms evolved slowly from 1830 to 1870 by a lot of workers, including Babbage, Boole, Lovelace, etc. Babbage, who outlived all of his chums, is considered to be the father of the computer. Ada Lovelace was tutored by Babbage and expanded his ideas on computing and algorithms in 1843. The mes operator and the R constant should be defined in the article.203.219.69.6 (talk) 06:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

nationality
Is he English? So are the whites born in South-Africa or Australia also labelled as English? 192.87.123.159 (talk) 13:19, 1 April 2010 (UTC). Error, this comment was intended for Augustus de Morgan article.192.87.123.159 (talk) 15:41, 1 April 2010 (UTC).

The opening paragraph states English, but the infobox has Irish. At least one of them (OR?) needs to be changed. Matt Adore (talk) 07:18, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Recognise / recognize
The context is these two diffs: original change reversion.

Note that the establishment of an ENGVAR for a given page (and this one is correctly British English, because of WP:TIES) does not affect direct quotes. As I understand it, the -ise spellings are relatively recent, and most likely Boole, who died in 1864, did not use them. If the original quote had -ize, then so should we.

However, the source does have recognise, so we should go with that for now, until someone finds a source that contradicts it. --Trovatore (talk) 16:26, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Language style
I find the language of this article to be excessively technical, particularly the "Works" section, which requires university level education to understand. A simpler explanation of Boolean logic in the style of the one given by Robert EA Harvey above would help. Tim flatus (talk) 01:51, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Death
The death subsection needs copy editing. Why does it state "the wet having brought on his illness"? 1) This is awfully unscientific; 2) even if the water did cause the disease (which is absurd), this would need appropriate referencing. The cause of death listed as pleural effusion caused by infection seems reasonable, and this is the narrative path the subsection needs, not this retrograde mumbojumbo. If there are sources available describing his infection and subsequent pleural effusion, we need to use them to resolve this issue. Best, FoCuS contribs ;  talk to me!  03:11, 2 November 2015 (UTC)