Tom Griffiths

Then you can think about everything that's unfolded from there is really trying to find better kinds of math to make this work with the consequence that we can get machines to do some of it on our behalf.

Yeah, it's a little more complicated than that.

I'm sure it is.

So if you work your way through.

So he wrote two books.

The first one he wrote, it's quite short, and he wrote it in sort of like a visionary fit.

So he actually had this first vision as a...

as a teenager, you know, wandering through a field in England.

And he sort of has this moment, which he really attributed to a divine insight, which was the idea that maybe something like algebra could be used to describe thought.

And then

He was incredibly busy.

He started a school of his own and he was, for most of his life, a teacher and headmaster and running the school at the same time as writing these mathematical papers that were then the highest level of mathematics and receiving a medal from the Royal Society, despite never having

had a university affiliation.

And so that mathematical spirit was expressed in his first book about this, which did exactly what I was saying about trying to turn Aristotle into math.

And he had a scheme for doing this.

And then it got developed further into this long treatise, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, which the first half is about probability theory.

And then the second half is about, sorry, the first half is about

first half is about logic and the second half is about probability theory um and in that book you

The place he starts, because of Aristotle, is thinking about sets and how it is that you could think about expressing the relations between sets in terms of mathematical operations.

So if x is a set and y is a set, then x times y is going to be what we now call the intersection of those sets, the things that are both x and y. And he works out the math for doing that.