The Mathematical Analysis of Logic: Being an Essay Towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning

George Boole (1815-64) is renowned as the first logician to apply algebraical methods to logic successfully. His Mathematical Analysis of Logic, first published in 1847, was the ground-breaking work that laid the foundations for what is known today as Boolean algebra and the propositional calculus. Written in response to the altercation between Sir William Hamilton and Augustus de Morgan over the quantification of the predicate within syllogistic theory, its remarkable innovations led other logicians, among them William Stanley Jevons, John Venn, Charles Sanders Peirce and Ernst Schroder, to refine and develop Boole's system. In turn, their efforts were incorporated by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell into the monumental system of Principia Mathematica. In short, modern symbolic logic was founded in the pages of this book.