You’ve heard of George Boole. Or you haven’t. Those are Boolean statements: ones that are either true or false. Boole, born on this day in 1815, was an English mathematician who devised a form of algebra that deals with true-or-false statements rather than numerical quantities, replacing addition and multiplication with “and”, “or” and “not”. Others subsequently built on his work, notably Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, who realised in the 1930s that true-or-false logic could be implemented in on-or-off electrical circuits. Boolean logic gates now form the building blocks of all digital computing devices, including the one in front of you. Boole, with his contemporaries Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (also born in 1815, and author of the first machine algorithm), is therefore remembered as one of the Victorian pioneers of modern computing. So raise a glass to Boole today—or don’t. It’s one or the other.