George Boole
loreprogramming
The mathematician who in 1854 built an algebra of logic, ninety years before anyone had a machine to run it on.
He was describing reasoning, not circuits. The connection was made by Shannon in 1937, and the gap between the two is the point: a piece of pure mathematics sat unused for three generations and then turned out to be the exact description of how switches behave. Every conditional, every access-control rule and every packet filter is his algebra with an implementation.
Also known as: boole, boolean algebra