A self-taught Irish schoolteacher wrote a book in 1854 that almost nobody read for 80 years, until a 21-year-old MIT student picked it up and realized it could be used to design every computer in human history.
His name was George Boole. The book is called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.
Boole was born in 1815 in Lincoln, England. His family was poor. He left school at 16 to support them. He taught himself Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian.
Then he taught himself mathematics. By 19 he had opened his own school. By 24 he was publishing original papers in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, competing with men who had spent decades inside the best universities in Britain.
He never had a degree. He never had a mentor. In 1849, Queen's College in Cork hired him as a professor anyway.
In 1854, he published his masterwork. What he built inside it was something nobody had attempted before at this scale. He turned logic into algebra.
Before Boole, logic was philosophy. You argued in sentences. You reasoned in paragraphs. It was powerful and completely impossible to automate, because there was no formal system underneath it, just language.
Boole stripped it down to arithmetic. He showed that every act of human reasoning could be reduced to operations on two values. True or false. One or zero. AND, OR, NOT. If both conditions are true, the result is true. If neither is, the result is false. Every judgment a human mind makes, every decision, every deduction, could be written as an equation following those rules.
Logicians read it. They found it interesting. Engineers building machines had never heard of it.
For 83 years, the book sat there.
Then in 1937, a 21-year-old MIT master's student named Claude Shannon was working on a thesis about electrical relay circuits. Switches that could be open or closed. Current that either flowed or didn't.
He read Boole and understood something nobody had connected before.
An open switch is a zero. A closed switch is a one. A circuit with two switches in series only carries current when both are closed. That is AND. A circuit with two switches in parallel carries current when either is closed. That is OR. Shannon proved that every possible logical relationship Boole had described could be physically built using wire and switches.
That single insight is the foundation of every computer ever made.
After Shannon, chip designers stopped thinking about electricity and started thinking about logic. Every transistor on every processor running right now is implementing a Boolean operation. Every if-statement in every codebase is Boolean logic. Every database query using AND or OR. Every neural network threshold that fires or doesn't fire. All of it is running the algebra of a self-taught schoolteacher from Lincoln who died 160 years ago.
The strangest part is what happened to Boole at the end.
He was walking to class in November 1864 when he got caught in a rainstorm. He lectured for hours in wet clothes. He went home sick. His wife, Mary, believed in homeopathic medicine and thought the cure should mirror the cause. She wrapped him in wet sheets and poured cold water over him repeatedly.
He died a few days later. He was 49.
He never saw a transistor. He never saw a circuit. He never saw a single physical machine run a single one of his rules.
His book is in the public domain. Free to download. Most engineers use the word Boolean dozens of times a week. Almost none of them know who they are saying.
The man whose logic runs inside every phone, every server, and every AI model on Earth died soaking wet in a small Irish town, 83 years before anyone figured out what he had actually built.
Universities are not tarvens. They are not spaza shops. Countries are locked in a fierce competition for top talent to fire industries of the 21st Century and we have people thinking like Mthakathi. By the way, where can we read his PhD Thesis?
🇸🇴 Nunca vi algo así. En Somalia hoy se llenó un estadio para recibir como héroe nacional a Omar Artan, el árbitro al que Estados Unidos le negó la entrada al Mundial. Increíble.
Data presented to parliament indicated that of the full time staff nationally 3 022 were foreign nationals which is 4.61% of the full time staff. Are we now saying we want 0% foreigners?
Overall the number was 7.7% of university staff are foreign nationals, these are people who are vetted, given jobs which were previously advertised and could not be filled locally and have the relevant visas. What is the problem?
HSRC says 42% of South Africans do not want immigrants. 58% of South Africans want some foreign immigrants.
The latest data from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) confirms this breakdown, showing that 42% of South Africans would welcome no immigrants, while the remaining 58% are open to accepting some (41%) or all (15%) foreign nationals.
This statistic comes from the HSRC South African Social Attitudes Survey, which has tracked public opinion on immigration since 2003.
I remember studying psychology, sociology, and behavioural economics at university and learning about what is often described as the “scarcity mindset” and the phenomenon of “proximate competition”.
People living under conditions of chronic economic insecurity and abject poverty tend to focus on immediate and visible competitors rather than distant and powerful centres of economic power.
The foreign-owned spaza shop on the corner becomes a symbol of economic exclusion because it is tangible, visible, and accessible, whereas banks, mining conglomerates, retail giants, and financial institutions are abstract, complex, and seemingly untouchable.
Sociologists have long observed that when people feel powerless to change their economic circumstances, frustration is often redirected towards those closest to them on the social and economic ladder rather than towards those at the top who exercise the greatest economic influence.
That is why many engage those they perceive as powerful with caution and respect, while directing anger, hostility, and sometimes violence towards those who are no more powerful than themselves. It is psychologically easier to confront the vulnerable than to challenge entrenched centres of power.
This creates a cycle in which communities fight over small pockets of relatively inconsequential wealth while leaving larger structures of capital accumulation untouched.
The tragedy is that energy which could be channelled into education, organisation, entrepreneurship, skills development, or demands for structural economic reform is instead expended on battles over the lowest rungs of the economy.
They fight over spaza shops, which are often little more than survival businesses, rather than focusing on the institutions and structures that have a far greater influence on wealth creation and economic opportunity. Their circumstances, shaped by decades and even centuries of structural economic inequality, remain largely unchanged.
In this sense, persistent poverty is often sustained not merely by a lack of resources, but by a failure to recognise where economic power actually resides, how it is accumulated, and how it is reproduced across generations.
This is also reflected in political leadership at the highest levels, in the battles they choose to prioritise and the issues they focus on when engaging the proletariat and the lumpen elements of society.
They focus on T-shirts, they focus on chicken and chips, and they focus on trivial giveaways that do little to transform anyone’s life.
A T-shirt is worn today and discarded a year later, only to be replaced with another one at the next election cycle, whether five years later or perhaps two and a half years later during local government elections.
Meanwhile, the structural problems of education, industrialisation, job creation, healthcare, and economic empowerment remain unresolved. That, in many ways, is the tragedy of Africa.
A white person...not EFF...not anyone else but a WHITE person confirms that March and March is a project funded by white people to serve their own agenda!
They used the easiest strategy..fight your fellow brothers & sisters especially now that you're all hungry!
@EFFSouthAfrica
Black South Africans and Black Americans often share similar attitudes toward Africa, they are so disconnected with the reality of the continent
How can Nigeria and Ghana sharing same border? How sh@llow could you be??
There’re 2 countries between Ghana and Nigeria
Anti-immigrant marchers turned against South African people on Saturday. Some protestors were heard openly saying: "AmaShaangane (a derogatory term for Tsonga people) must go."
https://t.co/hUfoRMDB9e