the.com/symbolic logic
math's revenge on ordinary language, so arguments can't hide behind ambiguity anymore.
means a system that replaces words like and, or, not, and if-then with symbols so reasoning can be checked mechanically instead of argued about.
from boole and de morgan in the 1840s tried to turn aristotle's logic into algebra; frege and russell later pushed it further to rebuild all of mathematics from pure logic, which mostly worked until godel showed the cracks.
boolean algebrapowers every circuit in every computer ever built
russell's paradoxbroke naive set theory using one sentence about sets
godel's proofused symbolic logic to prove logic itself has limits
principia mathematicaneeded 379 pages to prove 1 plus 1 equals 2
for instance
principia mathematica — russell and whitehead, 1910, three volumes to formalize all math
turing machines — 1936, symbolic logic reborn as the blueprint for computation