George Boole (1815–1864) was a self-taught English mathematician of humble origins who gave us the linguistic framework for the digital world. In his 1854 work, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, Boole reduced the complexities of human logic to a simple algebraic system using only two states: true and false, represented by a one and a zero.
His “Boolean Algebra” was a mathematical curiosity for nearly a century, but it eventually became the fundamental “language” of every computer on Earth. His genius was in realising that logic was not just a matter of philosophy, but a branch of mathematics.