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to Hypotenuse ContentsGeorge Boole, the English mathematician and logician, who developed Boolean algebra, has a strong Irish connection in that he became the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork (now University College, Cork) in 1849.
He was born on 2 November 1815 at Lincoln, the son of an unsuccessful small shopkeeper. He obtained little formal education -- some teaching from his father and a local bookseller, and a few years at local schools. In mathematics, he was largely self-taught. He lost the chance to go to university, since, when his father’s business declined, George had to go to work to support the family. At the age of 16 he became a teacher and worked in village schools in Yorkshire. After three years, he opened up his own school in Lincoln. The need to teach his pupils mathematics aroused his interest in the subject and his innate ability enabled him to read and understand, entirely on his own, some of the most difficult works of Newton, Laplace, and Lagrange. Soon he began making discoveries of his own, mainly in the field of abstract algebra, and submitted a stream of original papers, beginning in 1839, to The Cambridge Mathematical Journal and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. In 1844, for his contributions, he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society -- the first time that the medal was awarded for discoveries in pure mathematics.
Boole soon saw that algebra could be applied in logic and set about creating an algebra of logic. This was to be his greatest achievement and he described this work in two books. In 1847, he produced the first of these, a slim volume called "The Mathematical Analysis of Logic". It was the good reception given to this book and his earlier papers that led to Boole’s move from school-teaching to the professorship of mathematics at the recently opened Queen’s College, Cork in 1849 even though he had never taken a university degree. He was able to use his new freedom from financial anxiety and his lesser workload to prepare his masterpiece "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought", which he published in 1854. He regarded this as a mature statement of his ideas, his most valuable contribution to science and the work for which he would like to be remembered.
The algebraic system that Boole described in "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" later became known as Boolean algebra. In Boolean algebra, logical propositions are denoted by symbols, e.g. p, q, and can be acted on by abstract mathematical operators e.g. "and", "or", "not", that correspond to the laws of logic. As well as Boolean algebra being of importance in the study of pure mathematics, it has a vital application in modern life -- its role in electronic circuit theory and the design of computers. This application of Boolean algebra was taken up most effectively in 1938 by the American applied mathematician and electrical engineer, Claude Elwood Shannon, who wrote a paper entitled "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" based on Boole’s analysis of logic. This connection of Boole with the design of computers means that he affects all of our lives in the modern world. Moreover, the reference to "thought" in the title of his masterpiece presaged current debates on Artificial Intelligence.
In 1855, he married Mary Everest, niece of Sir George Everest, for whom the world’s highest mountain is named. The marriage was a happy one and the Booles had five daughters. In 1857, George was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. During these later years, he produced influential mathematical texts, and also published ideas on the humane education of children. He died prematurely in 1864, in his fiftieth year, from pneumonia contracted after keeping a lecture engagement in severe weather.
References
Hollingdale, S. (1989). Makers of mathematics. London: Penguin.
Morgan, B. (1972). Men and discoveries in mathematics. London: John
Murray.