Morgan was Babbage’s friend and Ada Byron’s tutor and a professor at University College, London. Boole was the son of a Lincolnshire cobbler and a lady’s maid and became, by the 1840s, a professor at Queen’s College, Cork. In 1847 they published separately and simultaneously books that amounted to the greatest milestone in the development of logic since Aristotle: Boole’s Mathematical Analysis of Logic, Being an Essay Towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning, and De Morgan’s Formal Logic: or, the Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable. The subject, esoteric as it was, had stagnated for
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