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George Boole

1815–1864

 

Science has never seemed a very strong part of the Irish tradition, yet Irish people and others whose life's work was spent in Ireland have made important scientific advances.  George Boole, whose name is still honoured in Irish scientific circles, was one of these.  But scientists work in an international, not a national, mode.  Boole is important not only because, as Bertrand Russell observed, he discovered pure mathematics, but because his work lies behind the modern computer revolution.

      He was born in Lincoln, in the east of England, on 2nd November 1815 - the year of Waterloo.  His father was a poor tradesman, which did not give young George much of a start in life.  Indeed, if he had been poorer, initially things might have gone better for him.  But he was clever, and at sixteen was appointed an assistant master in a small school in Doncaster.  This was the beginning of a distinguished teaching career, and at the age of twenty he opened his own school back in Lincoln.  This was more civilized than the others he had attended or taught in, and it was here, while trying to teach mathematics to his own pupils, that his own deepening interest in the subject was aroused.

      He worked alone.  At first his main interest was invariants, without which Einstein's theory of relativity would have been impossible.  He was almost the only mathematician in the British Isles to write about logic.  His first thoughts were contained in a small booklet he published in 1847 called Mathematical Analysis of Logic, but he later came to think of this as quite inadequate.  It required more work, but what his contemporary, Prof. William de Morgan, called the 'splendid invention' of symbolic, or mathematical, logic was a major advance.  It brought him the friendship of de Morgan and other workers, who urged him to go to Cambridge University as a student and begin an academic career.  But Boole was happy enough to persist with his schoolwork.

      Boole was not unambitious, however, and in 1849 was appointed professor of mathematics at the Queen's College in Cork (now University College Cork, a constituent college of the National University of Ireland).  Here at last was an opening in which he could develop his thoughts almost free from monetary pressures and concern for the care of his elderly parents, who depended on him.  In 1855 he married a relative of the explorer Sir George Everest, for whom Mount Everest is named, and 'with whom he lived in perfect domestic happiness', as Mrs Boole later told one of her husband's biographers.  They had five daughters.

      By this time his reputation as an advanced mathematician was already known.  A decade before he had published a paper entitled 'Theory of Analytical Transformation', in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal.  This led to a long friendship with the editor D.F. Gregory.  He wrote what were then considered two important textbooks, Differential Equations (1859) and Finite Differences (1860).

      But his most important and far-reaching work was The Laws of Thought (1854), in which symbolic language and notation were employed to express purely logical processes.  'The design of the following treatise,' he wrote, 'is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic and construct its method; and to make that method itself the basis of a general method for the application of the mathematical doctrine of probabilities; and, finally, to collect from the various elements of truth brought to view in the course of these inquiries some probable intimation concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind.'

      This ambitious work was widely influential, being followed up by workers in Britain, Europe, and America, and it lies at the very root of the dependence of the modern world on computers, for it reduced the theoretical basis of logic to a choice between 0 and 1, the key to all modern computing science.

      As Professor E.T. Bell, the historian of mathematical thought, wrote, 'The intricacy and delicacy of the difficulties explored by the symbolic reasoning methods would, it is safe to say, defy human reason if only the old, pre-Boole methods of verbal logical arguments were at our disposal.  The daring originality of Boole's whole project needs no signpost.  It is a landmark in itself.'

      After writing his masterpiece, Boole did not live much longer.  His health had not always been good, and he worked long hours.  He was also involved in the difficult academic politics of the college, which were often very overheated and outspoken.  Going into college in the winter of 1864 he contracted a cough, which was followed by pneumonia, from which he died on 8th December 1864.

      Nineteenth-century mathematics laid the foundation for twentieth-century physics.  Early last century, Boole's work was brought to a wider audience by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and it has been further developed by many others since.  Boole's creative work in The Laws of Thought laid the foundations for the computer revolution, a fact which only became clear as modern machines began to develop from the primitive devices of the 1940s.  The modern information revolution which is transforming the whole nature of life itself owes an immense debt to the work and influence of George Boole and his studies at Cork a century-and-a-half ago.  Every computer that is turned on in the world today is a child of George Boole's genius.