George
Boole

Every search you run and every device in your pocket follows rules written by a man who lived and taught in Cork. George Boole arrived in 1849 as the first professor of mathematics at the new Queen’s College Cork, now University College Cork, and he stayed for the rest of his life.

He came from nowhere the academic world recognised. Born in Lincoln in 1815, the son of a shoemaker, he left school at sixteen and taught himself Latin, Greek and, above all, mathematics while working as a schoolteacher to keep his family fed. He never earned a university degree. By his twenties his original papers were drawing the attention of the leading mathematicians of the day.

The self-taught prodigy

He opened his own school at nineteen to support his parents and siblings, and worked through Newton, Lagrange and Laplace in whatever hours he could find. The mathematics he could not afford to be taught, he simply taught himself.

In 1844 the Royal Society gave him its first gold medal awarded for a mathematics paper. He had no degree, no chair and no money, but the prize put his name in front of the people who decided such things.

When Queen’s College Cork opened in 1849, it took a chance on the self-taught Englishman and made him its first professor of mathematics. He arrived a stranger and became a Corkman.

The laws of thought

In 1854 Boole published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, the book that made his name. He did something that sounds modest and proved revolutionary: he wrote logic as algebra.

Statements became symbols. Reasoning became calculation. His system reduced logic to two values, true and false, one and zero, joined by a handful of operations: and, or, not.

In his own century the idea was admired as elegant and filed away as having no practical use. He could not have guessed what it would become.

Why it matters

Almost a hundred years later, engineers building electrical switching circuits realised that Boole’s true-and-false algebra described exactly how a switch behaves: on or off, one or zero. Boolean logic became the foundation of digital circuits, and from there of every computer, phone and search engine ever built.

The “Boolean” in a search box, the AND and OR that narrow your results, carry his name. The marsh-built college where he taught helped invent the modern world without quite noticing.

On the tour

We pass the university he helped open and the streets he crossed to lecture each day. In late 1864 he walked two miles through heavy rain, taught in his wet clothes and caught the fever that killed him within weeks. His widow, Mary Everest Boole, was a mathematician in her own right. You stand where the algebra behind your phone was written.