George Boole, a Forerunner of Symbolic Computation

We examine in this invited presentation Boole's principles of logic and his method of performing inferences. The principles of Boole's logic are based on the application of an early symbolic calculus known in his time as the "method of separation of symbols". His logic's inference procedures are symbolic operations allowed inside this method. Such inference procedures are reinterpreted and generalized using computer algebra. The lecture also presents a short biography of Boole and a description of some of the factors that had an influence on the genesis of his logic.

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