Tom Griffiths

deeply how to do... You could automate arithmetic.

He'd built mechanical calculators.

And so if you could express thought in terms of arithmetic, then it was going to be something that you could get a machine to do for you.

And he had this vision of how all of this would work, but it didn't quite work out in the system that he had.

And then a hundred years later, George Boole came along and he

He had a mathematical training that was unusual for an Englishman having learned all of this continental algebra.

And then he recognized that it wasn't quite arithmetic that you needed, it was a slightly different algebra.

And then that became something where he was then able to show using that math that he'd introduced, you could actually take all of Aristotle and start doing it mathematically.

And that title, the laws of thought, that comes from that 19th century effort where Gould and his contemporaries were interested in this idea that, yeah, just like you have the laws of nature, you might have this parallel laws of thought.

So that's the first thread that I start to trace through to the modern day.

Yeah.

So this is based on a series of unpublished notes that he wrote.

It's a really interesting case.

If you know, Leibniz was clearly a genius and this was a problem that he never solved.

But you get to see him working through this because there's this series of notes that he writes that are going to be part of his big book, which is about something he called the universal character.

And the universal character was this idea that you might be able to

write things down in such a way that it was clear what the consequences were that followed from those things.

And so this was an idea that his contemporaries shared.

In the book, I talk about the Reverend Wilkins who came up with this.

script and corresponding way of pronouncing it in which it was impossible to say something which was false.