“Who is George Boole?” a few Google hits over the next 24 hours after the search engine decided to honour the Englishman’s 200th birthday with an algebraic re-imaging of its Google doodle.
Boole was a mathematician, logician and philosopher whose legacy of Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age.
Born 200 years ago on November 2, his algebraic approach to logic, in which all values are reduced to either “true” or “false”, is still used today.
He also devised a type of linguistic algebra, now known as Boolean algebra, the three most basic operations of which are “and”, “or” and “not”.
A largely self-taught child prodigy, Boole never attended university and was forced to leave school at 16 years old after his father’s shoe business collapsed. He became an assistant teacher the same year and opened his own school when he was 20.
He was just 24 when he published his first paper, Researches on the Theory of Analytical Transformations in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal.
Six years later, in 1847, he published his first book The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, where he introduced the concept of “symbolic logic” where mathematical symbols are used to represent classes or sets of objects, and the symbols are manipulated through mathematics.
In 1849, he was appointed the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork (now University College Cork (UCC)) in Ireland.
Boole died of pneumonia in 1864, when he was 49 years old.
