
George Boole: A 200-Year View - julien
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/11/george-boole-a-200-year-view/
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s_dev
Theres an RTE (Irish National Broadcaster) documentary on George Boole thats
very good. He was an interesting and brave figure to travel to Ireland
_during_ the Irish famine as an Englishman. He was warmly welcomed and he
firmly rejected the condescending aristocratic attitudes prevalent in
Victorian Britain at that time.

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tria56
is there a way to watch/download that documentary without using some Irish
proxy?

~~~
s_dev
Yes. One could attain illegally via the torrent route the other is snail
mailing RTE and asking how to get a copy. It's narrated by Jeremy Irons.

You can see a trailer here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEjzjLv-
YjI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEjzjLv-YjI)

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delazeur
I'm not very familiar with the history of this area, but I've heard repeatedly
that Wolfram has a pattern of implicitly or explicitly taking credit for
results he wasn't the first person to discover. Can anyone comment on his
claim that he found "the provably very simplest axiom system for logic?"

~~~
scholia
He says:

 _over the course of the century that followed, a few progressively simpler
forms of it were found_

and

 _But in the context of George Boole, one can say that it’s a minimal version
of his big idea_

Since this is an aside, he doesn't cover it in depth. However, he is clearly
saying (1) that his claim is a derivative of Boole's idea, and (2) that lots
of other people made simplifications before he did.

This doesn't sound to me like "implicitly or explicitly taking credit for
results he wasn't the first person to discover".

And the last time I saw such a claim on HN, it was clearly wrong.

In passing, my own favorite simplification is G Spencer Brown's Laws of Form,
which has mostly been forgotten now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form)

~~~
delazeur
He certainly put his claim in context, but my suspicion was that "I ended up
finishing this 150-year process" was a bit grandiose, so I wanted to see if
anyone was familiar with this work.

People can definitely be quick to criticize Wolfram for pomposity, but I've
seen a lot of passages from _A New Kind of Science_ where he says "I
discovered X" but means "someone else discovered X, then I confirmed it for
myself."

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dragandj
TL;DR: "And then, as it happens, 16 years ago I ended up finishing this
150-year process, by finding—largely as a side effect of other science I was
doing—the provably very simplest possible axiom system for logic, that
actually happens to consist of just a single axiom.", says Stephen Wolfram.

So, although the article is seemingly about George Boole and his work, the
real hero is the always humble Stephen.

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here. This reflexive criticism of everything Wolfram
touches, however originally justified, has become a derangement syndrome in
its own right.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10723588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10723588)

The topic here is George Boole, an important and fascinating figure. We ought
to be able to discuss Boole whether the OP's name is Wolfram or not, whether
or not he drops asides about himself. Otherwise we just turn into the mirror
image of the very quality we find annoying.

