George Boole 1815 – 1864

George Boole was an English mathematician, logician, and philosopher and one of the founders of mathematical logic. Almost entirely self-taught, he became professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork, and produced two short books, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, that recast traditional logic in algebraic form. The system that bears his name is the foundation of modern digital computing and a key formal influence on the rise of analytic philosophy in the work of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead. He died of pneumonia at forty-nine.

George Boole was born at Lincoln in November 1815, the son of a struggling shoemaker who passed on a love of mathematics and instrument-making but no formal education. Almost entirely self-taught after leaving school at sixteen, he worked as an assistant teacher in Doncaster and Liverpool, opened his own school in Lincoln in 1834, and from 1838 ran the Free Writing Academy at Waddington while teaching himself the new Continental analysis. The Royal Society awarded him its first gold medal in mathematics in 1844, and in 1849 he was appointed first professor of mathematics at the new Queen's College, Cork.

His major works are The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847), An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), the Treatise on Differential Equations (1859), and the Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences (1860). He married Mary Everest, niece of the surveyor of India after whom Mount Everest is named, in 1855.

Boole created an algebra in which the laws of class logic and propositional inference are derived as a calculus of 0 and 1, opening the way for the symbolic logic of De Morgan, Peirce, Schröder, and Frege; in the twentieth century the same algebra became, through Shannon's 1937 thesis, the logic of switching circuits and digital computation. He died of pleural fever at Ballintemple, near Cork, in December 1864, aged forty-nine.