P. R. Halmos eBooks

The theory of Boolean algebras was created in 1847 by the English mat- matician George Boole. He conceived it as a calculus (or arithmetic) suitable for a mathematical analysis of logic. The form of his calculus was rather di?erent from the modern version, which came into being during the - riod 18641895 through the contributions of William Stanley Jevons, Aug- tus De Morgan, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ernst Schr oder. A foundation of the calculus as an abstract algebraic discipline, axiomatized by a set of equations, and admitting many di?erent interpretations, was carried out by Edward Huntington in 1904. Only with the work of Marshall Stone and Alfred Tarski in the 1930s, however, did Boolean algebra free itself completely from the bonds of logic...