Laws of Form

Laws of Form (hereinafter LoF) is a book by G. Spencer-Brown, published in 1969, that straddles the boundary between mathematics and philosophy. LoF describes three distinct logical systems:

• The "primary arithmetic" (described in Chapter 4 of LoF), whose models include Boolean arithmetic;
• The "primary algebra" (Chapter 6 of LoF), whose models include the two-element Boolean algebra (hereinafter abbreviated 2), Boolean logic, and the classical propositional calculus;
• "Equations of the second degree" (Chapter 11), whose interpretations include finite automata and Alonzo Church's Restricted Recursive Arithmetic (RRA).

"Boundary algebra" is Meguire's (2011)^[1] term for the union of the primary algebra and the primary arithmetic. Laws of Form sometimes loosely refers to the "primary algebra" as well as to LoF.