Introduction to Boolean Algebra

George Boole, the founder of Boolean algebra, is considered one of the founders of computer science. In 1847, when he wrote his famous book The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, he had not thought about PCs, mobiles, or tabs. But in his second book, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, which he wrote in 1854, he set the path for future computations. His great idea started a new branch of algebra, Boolean algebra, where the values of the variables are either true or false. They are usually denoted by 1 and 0, respectively. In elementary algebra, the values of variables are numbers, and we can perform several operations on them like addition and multiplication, etc.

In Boolean algebra, we can only perform three operations:

• Conjunction (using the AND operator)
• Disjunction (using the OR operator)
• Negation (using the NOT operator)

Logical operators

We can use logical operators similar to the numerical operators in elementary algebra.

Moreover, it helps programmers create a formal description of logical operations with the help of conditionals like if, else if, and else, and in some cases, using switch cases.

It adds great impetus to every modern programming language.

Not only that, with the help of the truth table, we can build a very complex decision tree. Let’s start with a simple example. We’ll look at the code first.