You probably know what Boolean operators and truth values are. But do you know George Boole?

George Boole was born on November 2, 1815, in Lincoln, England, as the son of a tradesman. After educating himself by reading books, then working as a school teacher, writing mathematical papers for math journals and his seminal work Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847, he was appointed as math professor at Queen’s College, Cork, Ireland, in 1849, at the age of 34.

In computer science his name is well-known from the primitive datatype Boolean that is built-into all modern programming languages. This datatype provides the two truth values true and false, or, algebraically, 1 and 0, which are the basis of classical (two-valued) propositional logic. However, these two truth values are only implicitly used in Boole's work of 1847, which inspired Charles Sanders Peirce to make them explicit in 1885.

In mathematics, Boole is most well-known from the theory of Boolean Algebra.

Let's celebrate Boole's birthday by doing some simple Boolean Algebra in JavaScript. Evaluate the following Boolean expressions:

Question 1.  true && false || true  

 True   False

Question 2.  (8%3 > 1) && !(8%3 > 2)

 True   False

Question 3.  !undefined 

 True   False

Question 4.  null || !0

 True   False

Question 5.  !"" && 2=="2"

 True   False

Question 6.  !"hello!" || 1==="1"

 True   False

If you would like to get the correct answers to these questions, you can do the quiz interactively at developer-competence.com or check the General Discussion Forum at web-engineering.info (if you can't find the answer on the forum, just ask for it with a post).