George Boole was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland.
54 Facts About George Boole
2.
George Boole worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra.
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George Boole received a primary school education and learned Latin and modern languages through various means.
4.
George Boole established his own school at 19 and later ran a boarding school in Lincoln.
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George Boole was an active member of local societies and collaborated with fellow mathematicians.
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In 1849, George Boole was appointed the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland, where he met his future wife, Mary Everest.
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George Boole continued his involvement in social causes and maintained connections with Lincoln.
8.
In 1864, George Boole passed away due to fever-induced pleural effusion after developing pneumonia.
9.
George Boole published around 50 articles and several separate publications in his lifetime.
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George Boole attempted to discover a general method in probabilities, focusing on determining the consequent probability of events logically connected to given probabilities.
11.
George Boole's work was expanded upon by various scholars, such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William Stanley Jevons.
12.
George Boole was born in 1815 in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England, the son of John George Boole senior, a shoemaker and Mary Ann Joyce.
13.
George Boole had a primary school education, and received lessons from his father, but due to a serious decline in business, he had little further formal and academic teaching.
14.
At age 16, George Boole became the breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings, taking up a junior teaching position in Doncaster at Heigham's School.
15.
George Boole participated in the Lincoln Mechanics' Institute, in the Greyfriars, Lincoln, which was founded in 1833.
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At age 19, George Boole successfully established his own school in Lincoln: Free School Lane.
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George Boole immediately became involved in the Lincoln Topographical Society, serving as a member of the committee, and presenting a paper entitled "On the origin, progress, and tendencies of polytheism, especially amongst the ancient Egyptians and Persians, and in modern India".
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George Boole became a prominent local figure, an admirer of John Kaye, the bishop.
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George Boole took part in the local campaign for early closing.
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George Boole associated with the Chartist Thomas Cooper, whose wife was a relation.
21.
From 1838 onwards, George Boole was making contacts with sympathetic British academic mathematicians and reading more widely.
22.
George Boole studied algebra in the form of symbolic methods, as far as these were understood at the time, and began to publish research papers.
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George Boole met his future wife, Mary Everest, there in 1850 while she was visiting her uncle John Ryall who was professor of Greek.
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George Boole was awarded the Keith Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1857.
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George Boole's works are in about 50 articles and a few separate publications.
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In 1841, George Boole published an influential paper in early invariant theory.
27.
George Boole received a medal from the Royal Society for his memoir of 1844, "On a General Method in Analysis".
28.
In 1847, George Boole published The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, the first of his works on symbolic logic.
29.
George Boole completed two systematic treatises on mathematical subjects during his lifetime.
30.
In 1857, George Boole published the treatise "On the Comparison of Transcendent, with Certain Applications to the Theory of Definite Integrals", in which he studied the sum of residues of a rational function.
31.
In 1847, George Boole published the pamphlet Mathematical Analysis of Logic.
32.
George Boole later regarded it as a flawed exposition of his logical system and wanted An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities to be seen as the mature statement of his views.
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Contrary to widespread belief, George Boole never intended to criticise or disagree with the main principles of Aristotle's logic.
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George Boole's approach was ultimately much further reaching than either sides' in the controversy.
35.
George Boole conceived of "elective symbols" of his kind as an algebraic structure.
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George Boole's work was a beginning to the algebra of sets, again not a concept available to Boole as a familiar model.
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George Boole's pioneering efforts encountered specific difficulties, and the treatment of addition was an obvious difficulty in the early days.
38.
George Boole replaced the operation of multiplication by the word "and" and addition by the word "or".
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George Boole argued against the result 0, which is correct for exclusive or, because he saw the equation x + x = 0 as implying x = 0, a false analogy with ordinary algebra.
40.
In late November 1864, George Boole walked, in heavy rain, from his home at Lichfield Cottage in Ballintemple to the university, a distance of three miles, and lectured wearing his wet clothes.
41.
George Boole's condition worsened and on 8 December 1864, he died of fever-induced pleural effusion.
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George Boole was buried in the Church of Ireland cemetery of St Michael's, Church Road, Blackrock.
43.
George Boole's work was extended and refined by a number of writers, beginning with William Stanley Jevons, who authored the article about George Boole in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
44.
Keynes believed that George Boole had made a fundamental error in his definition of independence which vitiated much of his analysis.
45.
Theodore Hailperin showed much earlier that George Boole had used the correct mathematical definition of independence in his worked out problems.
46.
George Boole proved that circuits with relays could solve Boolean algebra problems.
47.
George Boole's views were given in four published addresses: The Genius of Sir Isaac Newton; The Right Use of Leisure; The Claims of Science; and The Social Aspect of Intellectual Culture.
48.
George Boole considered converting to Judaism but in the end was said to have chosen Unitarianism.
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George Boole came to speak against what he saw as "prideful" scepticism, and instead favoured the belief in a "Supreme Intelligent Cause".
50.
Two influences on George Boole were later claimed by his wife, Mary Everest George Boole: a universal mysticism tempered by Jewish thought, and Indian logic.
51.
Mary George Boole stated that an adolescent mystical experience provided for his life's work:.
52.
George Boole was apparently disconcerted at the book's reception just as a mathematical toolset:.
53.
George Boole afterwards learned, to his great joy, that the same conception of the basis of Logic was held by Leibniz, the contemporary of Newton.
54.
In 1855, Boole married Mary Everest, who later wrote several educational works on her husband's principles.