The Fable of Booles

Programmers use the word "Boolean" on a daily basis. It's a term both for variables which can only have the values "True" or "False", as well as the branch of arithmetic dealing with those variables. It is a funny-sounding word, and we might ask, "Where did it come from?"

I'll tell you!

It goes back to the time of Ancient Greece. The philosopher Aristotle had a young student by the name of Booles. Now, Booles was an intellectual luminary. He took his mentor's ideas of logic and ran with them, crafting theories of computation, and how a mechanical apparatus could be devised to solve an infinite multitude of computations.

And the gods beheld his brilliance from their thrones on Mount Olympus, and they were pleased. So pleased were they that the god Apollo appeared to Booles and offered him a choice of mighty gifts: To make him the richest man in all of Greece, or to give him the tools to turn his computational device into reality.

"Excellent!" said Booles. "I will take both."

"...what?" said Apollo.

"Well, logically," said Booles, "you offered me any gift which meets the condition:"

Richest_Man_In_Greece == True or Create_Computational_Device == True

"which is satisfied by having both. If you only meant to offer me one, you should have specified an XOR."

Rather than answering, Apollo shot Booles through the eye with one of his arrows.

From that day forward, Booles was stricken with a terrible curse. He was paralyzed throughout his entire body, save for the one eyelid which the arrow had touched. His only way to communicate with the outside world was by blinking his eye: one blink for "True", two blinks for "False"

And that's where we get Boolean Logic!