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COURSE ASSIGNMENT 1
LineAl: LINEAR ALGEBRA | 3 units
a. If I am asked if this is the first time to hear about Boolean Arithmetic, my answer is “Yes”.
Honestly, perhaps this was discussed during my undergraduate courses and I just forget this
lesson. Now, by the name itself “Boolean Arithmetic”, one thing that comes into my mind when
I read it is that it will be dealing with operations and obviously about matrices.
b. As I researched about Boolean Arithmetic through encyclopedia.com, I have learned that the
proponent of this concept was the English mathematician George Boole (1815–1864). He was
the first to apply algebraic techniques to logical methodology and showed that logical
propositions and their connectives could be expressed in the language of set theory. Thus,
Boolean Arithmetic is also known as the Algebra of Sets.
c. Boolean arithmetic is also called ``Boolean algebra,'' ``propositional logic,'' ``mod 2 arithmetic.''
The Boolean domain has only two values, which we call 0 and 1. In other books and articles,
they are often called T and F. In my understanding, I guess that Boolean Product is one of the
operations used in Boolean Arithmetic.
d. Boolean operations may be defined by tables of all their values. There are only 4 possible unary
operations: constant 0, constant 1, identity and inverse. Constants and identity are trivial, and
inverse has the table
We write the inverse of a as . In other places, it may be written as , , or -a. Inverse is
also called, ``negation,'' or ``not.''There are 16 possible binary operations. The two most
important to us are and and or, with the following tables
We write a and b as ; other places it may be ab, , . Similarly, we
write a or b as a+b; other places it may be a|b, .
Every Boolean operation, no matter how many arguments it takes, may be defined by an
expression using inverse and either one of the binary operations and, or. It is particularly
convenient to use all three operations in expressions, and unless we say otherwise in a special
case, a ``Boolean expression'' will involve these three operations, and occasionally the
constants 0 and 1. In fact a single binary operation is sufficient to define all Boolean
operations: the nor operation defined by is sufficient, and so is the nand operation
defined by .
Another binary operation that you are likely to see is exclusive or, given by the table
We write the exclusive or of a and b as . Exclusive or is also called mod 2 sum.
Both or and xor are analogues to addition: the or treats 1 as infinity, and the xor works
modulo 2. and agrees with multiplication under both the 1-as-infinity and the modulo 2