In the company at which I work, we have several different areas of specialty which contribute to the materials the company produces. One of the departments consists of a group of very interesting guys who do the programming for the interactive content area. These guys are eccentric, irreverent and very creative, and provide a lot of amusement and interest to the area in which my cube resides.Today I overheard several of the guys talking about some things pertaining to internet and the like and one of them speculated about the origins of the term "boolean search". In my early days, I remember being trained on pure boolean search on the internet, including the practice of inserting (+),etc right into the search blank. The discussion piqued my curiosity...I consider myself a pretty proficient and efficient searcher on the internet, and I was kinda interested to find out where the name of the search type came from too.
Come to find out, the "Boolean search" is named after George Boole, (1815-1864), an English mathematician. The word "Boolean" refers to "a combinatorial system that combines propositions with the logical operators AND and OR and IF THEN and EXCEPT and NOT". Make sense now? Yep, I thought so too. If you want to know more about George Boole and his contributions to abstract algebra, do a search, boolean, if you will, for his name.
That's it for now...much love to you...tomorrow, staff development...should be very enlightening....
v
