RENA JOCELLE C.

NALZARO
BSA-2 ABM A
AIS (T TH, 02:30-04:00PM)

ASSIGNMENT:

1. LIFE AND WORKS OF GEORGE BOOLE

2. AMERICAN STANDARD CODE FOR INFORMATION INTERCHANGE ASCII

ANSWERS:

1. LIFE AND WORKS OF GEORGE BOOLE

 LIFE OF GEORGE BOOLE

George Boole (1815–1864) was born in Lincoln, England, the son of a struggling
shoemaker. Boole was forced to leave school at the age of sixteen and never attended a
university. He taught himself languages, natural philosophy and mathematics. After his
father’s business failed, he supported the entire family by becoming an assistant teacher,
eventually opening his own boarding school in Lincoln. He began to produce original
mathematical research and, in 1844, he was awarded the first gold medal for mathematics
by the Royal Society.

George Boole has been variously described as the founder of pure mathematics, father of
computer science and discoverer of symbolic logic. Boole is mostly remembered as a
mathematician and logician whose work found application in computer science long after
his death, but this biography reveals Boole as much more than a mathematical genius; he
was a child prodigy, self-taught linguist and practical scientist, turbulent academic and
devoted teacher, social reformer and poet, psychologist and humanitarian, religious
thinker and good family man – truly a nineteenth-century polymath.
 In 1849, Boole was appointed first professor of mathematics in Ireland’s new Queen’s
College (now University College) Cork and taught and worked there until his tragic and
premature death in 1864. In 1855, he had married Mary Everest, a niece of the man after
whom the world’s highest mountain is named. The Boole’s had five remarkable
daughters including Alicia, a mathematician, Lucy, a professor of chemistry, and Ethel
(Voynich), a novelist and author of The Gadfly.

 WORKS OF GEORGE BOOLE

Boole was deeply interested in the idea of expressing the workings of the human mind in
symbolic form, and his two books on this subject, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic
(1847) and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854) form the basis of today’s
computer science and electronic circuitry. He also made important contributions to areas
of mathematics such as invariant theory (of which he was the founder), differential and
difference equations and probability. Much of the ‘new mathematics’ now studied by
children in school – set theory, binary numbers and Boolean algebra, has its origins in
Boole’s work.

2. AMERICAN STANDARD CODE FOR INFORMATION INTERCHANGE

(ASCII)

The ASCII code was originally developed for teletypewriters but eventually found wide
application in personal computers. The standard ASCII code uses seven-digit binary
numbers; i.e., numbers consisting of various sequences of 0’s and 1’s. The code can
represent 128 different characters, since there are 128 different possible combinations of
seven 0’s and 1’s. The binary sequence 1010000, for example, represents an uppercase
“P,” while the sequence 1110000 represents a lowercase “p.”
ASCII, abbreviation of American Standard Code For Information Interchange, a standard
data-transmission code that is used by smaller and less-powerful computers to represent
both textual data (letters, numbers, and punctuation marks) and noninput-device
commands (control characters). Like other coding systems, it converts information into
standardized digital formats that allow computers to communicate with each other and to
efficiently process and store data.

Digital computers use a binary code that is arranged in groups of eight rather than of
seven digits, or bits. Each such eight-digit group is called a byte. Because digital
computers use eight-bit bytes, the ASCII code is commonly embedded in an eight-bit
field consisting of the seven information bits and a parity bit that is used for error-
checking purposes or to represent special symbols. The use of an eight-bit system
increased the number of characters the code could represent to 256. The eight-bit system,
which is known as the extended ASCII code, was introduced in 1981 by the International
Business Machines Corporation (IBM) for use with its first model of personal computer.
This extended ASCII code soon became the industry-wide standard for personal
computers. In it, 32 code combinations are used for machine and control commands, such
as “start of text,” “carriage return,” and “form feed.” The next group of 32 combinations
is used for numbers and various punctuation symbols. Another group of 32 combinations
is used for uppercase letters and a few other punctuation marks, and the last 32 are used
for lowercase letters.

A different coding system, the EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange
Code), is used in mainframe computers and minicomputers.

 ASCII

Stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange." ASCII is a character
encoding that uses numeric codes to represent characters. These include upper and
lowercase English letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols.

Standard ASCII
Standard ASCII can represent 128 characters. It uses 7 bits to represent each character
since the first bit of the byte is always 0. For instance, a capital "T" is represented by 84,
or 01010100 in binary. A lowercase "t" is represented by 116 or 01110100 in binary.
Other keyboard keys are also mapped to standard ASCII values. For example, the Escape
key (ESC) is 27 in ASCII and the Delete key (DEL) is 127.
ASCII codes may also be displayed as hexadecimal values instead of the decimal
numbers (0 to 127) listed above. For example, the ASCII value of the Escape key (27) in
hexadecimal is 1B. The hexadecimal value of the Delete key (127) is 7F.
Extended ASCII

The 128 (27) characters supported by standard ASCII are enough to represent all standard
English letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols. However, it is not sufficient to
represent all special characters and characters from other languages. Extended ASCII
helps solve this problem by adding an extra 128 values, for a total of 256 (28) characters.
The additional binary values start with a 1 instead of a 0. For example, in extended
ASCII, the character "é" is represented by 233, or 11101001 in binary. The capital letter
"Ö" is represented by 214, or 11010110 in binary.

While extended ASCII doubles the character set of standard ASCII, it does not include
nearly enough characters to support all languages. Some Asian languages, for example,
require thousands of characters. Therefore, other character encodings, such as Latin-1
(ISO-8859-1) and UTF-8 are now more commonly used than ASCII for documents and
webpages. UTF-8 supports over one million characters.