George Boole, the mathematician whose work indirectly made modern computing possible, was born two hundred years ago today.

Boole’s work is one of the great examples of a seemingly abstract process having practical physical benefits, albeit around seven decades after his death.

The British-born Boole developed a new form of algebra, with the difference being the variables. In elementary algebra, mathematicians use a letter as a variable, representing a number that’s either unknown or arbitrary. Treating this letter variable as if it were a number makes it possible to solve problems.

Boole’s form of algebra used 0s and 1s in place of letters to denote the variable. However, these digits didn’t correspond to the numbers zero and one. Instead they were part of a system where each variable represented just two possible states, respectively whether a given statement was false and true.

While Boole died in 1864, his work lived on in mathematics, particularly in probability theory and as a way to cover multiple connected variables in the simplest logical manner.

In the 1930s engineers Claude Shannon of the US and Victor Shestakov of the Soviet Union independently both realised that the binary states of false and true could be mapped to physical electrical switches being on or off. That could, for example, make it easier to create a telephone routing system as efficiently as possible.

That led to electronic digital computing in which computers could solve problems using Boolean logic. In turn that led to programmable computers in which any problem or processing could be represented with a binary code of 0s and 1s.

As well as inspiring the basis of how electronic computers actually work, Boolean logic also plays a key role in the advanced options for carrying out web searches. Whether it’s by checking off options or typing specific modifiers in a search term, Boolean logic allows users to carry out searches that must find two or more individual terms (AND), either of two or more terms (OR), or find results in which a specified term is absent (NOT). There’s also an associated modifier of putting a multi-word phrase in quotation marks to indicate that it should be treated as a single phrase for search purposes.