George Boole

George Boole was born in 1815 in Lincoln, England, the son of a shoemaker who loved science and instruments. The family was poor, and George largely taught himself mathematics and languages, including Latin and Greek. At sixteen he began working as an assistant teacher to help support his family, and he later ran his own schools. In his spare time he studied advanced mathematics and published research papers, and in 1844 he received a gold medal from the Royal Society. His book The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) showed that logical reasoning could be written in algebraic symbols. Although he had no university degree, he was appointed in 1849 as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork, in Ireland. His major work, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), developed what is now called Boolean algebra, in which statements are treated as true or false and combined with operations such as AND, OR and NOT. Nearly a century later, this became the basis of digital circuits and computers. He died in Ireland in 1864.

George Boole is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Biographers describe him as an 'agnostic deist' who read Christian theology widely and was drawn to Unitarianism. Source: Wikipedia