Boole’s problem and a zero-one lemma

We introduce Boole’s problem, and the reasonably large literature related to it. We then recall an old result of Renyi (1962) that we prefer to call “a zero-one lemma”, and show that it can provide a simple, elementary (short, high school level) proof for most of the results in the extensive literature about this problem. We also derive a few new results with the help of this powerful lemma.