If I were to put a phonebook in your hand and ask you to find your name, how would you do it?

Starting at page one and flipping through each page one by one is one way to stay occupied when contained in a room with no windows. But say this phonebook is the only thing between you and a mountain to climb, sunshine to enjoy?

How could we expedite the process?

You might open the phonebook in the middle. Look at the page. Did you pass your name, or haven’t you reached it yet? Keep only the half that contains your name and set the other half aside. Now open what’s left in the middle again. Are you before or after your name? Keep the relevant half. Keep splitting what remains in half until you land on your name.

Now think about how you would write that process as a program, an algorithm.

Now think about how you would write that process as a program, an algorithm. Computers can execute this using binary decisions, TRUE or FALSE, 1 or 0. At each step: ‘Is my name before this page? TRUE or FALSE.’ That simple yes/no logic, repeated 10 times, finds your name among thousands of pages. A process that can execute in milliseconds.

That process is made possible by Boolean algebra, the idea that you can represent truth through math, with 1s and 0s. It’s what every computer, search algorithm, and line of code ever written relies on.

And what I love about innovation is that behind every breakthrough there’s an individual.

In this case, we have George Boole. Born in Lincoln, England in 1815 to a poor shoemaker, he became the head of the household at 16 when his father’s business failed. Despite being self-taught, at 19 he had opened his own school to teach others. In the evenings, he was reading and teaching himself advanced mathematics. He enjoyed it so much that he wrote a paper called “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic,” proposing using math to represent TRUE and FALSE.

Mr. Boole was cooking a century before computers existed.

Giants are often unaware that their shoulders are the ones that will be stood on.