The history of logic is very interesting, and has undergone many phases. In the Western world, it began about 2500 years ago when the Greeks were developing a new form of civic structure in which debate and argumentation replaced allegience to tradition as the major political tools.

Slowly philosophers realized that, if laws were to be based on the outcome of arguments, an understanding of how valid arguments are actually constructed was crucial. Formal logic began when thinkers like Aristotle started using simple diagrams, like the famous Logic Square, to study these structures. This was an amazing innovation because it involved applying a mixture of algebra and geometry to the study of language, that is, language in its role as the medium of argumentation.

During the middle ages, many thinkers dreamed of being able to make a complete mathematical analysis of logic, a complete formal notation for describing arguments and their components. The Spanish nobleman Raymond Lull, a famous 11th century debaucher who latter turned religious, was probably the first to have this idea, and in that sense he is considered by some as the great-great-grandfather of computing.

However, the mathematization of logic didn’t really get very far until the mid-nineteenth century when an Englishmen named George Boole developed the first fully-fledged formal notation.

The study of logic radically changed at this point. It’s not dissimilar to the way that in the sixteenth and seventeenth century physicists revolutionized the study of motion by mathematizing it.