George Boole

Every search you run and every device in your pocket obeys rules written by a man who lived and taught in Cork. George Boole arrived in 1849 as the first professor of mathematics at the brand new Queen's College, now UCC, and he never left. He came from nowhere the academic world recognised. Born in Lincoln in 1815, the son of a shoemaker, he left school at sixteen, taught himself Latin, Greek and mathematics while running a school to feed his family, and never sat a university exam in his life. By the time Cork came calling, the best mathematicians in Britain were reading his papers and wondering who he was.

The self-taught prodigy

He opened his own school at nineteen to support his parents and his younger brothers and sister, and worked through Newton, Lagrange and Laplace at night in whatever hours the day job left him. The mathematics he could not afford to be taught, he simply taught himself, in the original French where he had to. In 1844 the Royal Society gave him its first gold medal ever awarded for a mathematics paper. He had no degree, no chair and no money, but the medal put his name in front of the people who decided such things. When the Queen's Colleges opened in 1849, Cork took a chance on the self-taught Englishman and made him professor. He arrived a stranger and became a Corkman, married a local professor's niece, Mary Everest, and settled in Ballintemple.

The laws of thought

In 1854, in a house in Cork, he finished An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, the book that made his name. He did something that sounds modest and turned out to be one of the big ideas of the last two centuries: he wrote logic as algebra. Statements became symbols. Reasoning became calculation. His system boiled every question down to two values, true and false, one and zero, joined by a handful of operations, and, or and not. In his own century people admired it as elegant and filed it away as having no practical use whatsoever. He died believing that.

Why it matters

Eighty years later a young American engineer called Claude Shannon noticed that Boole's true-and-false algebra described exactly how an electrical switch behaves: on or off, one or zero. That was 1937. Boolean logic became the grammar of switching circuits, then of every computer, phone and search engine ever built. The AND and OR that narrow your search results carry his name. A college on a marsh in Cork helped invent the modern world without quite noticing at the time.

The walk in the rain

The end was as Cork as it gets. In November 1864 he walked the two miles from his house in Ballintemple to the college in pouring rain, lectured in his wet clothes, and went home with a chill that turned to pneumonia. His wife Mary, a follower of the medical fashions of the day, is said to have treated like with like and wrapped him in wet sheets. He died on 8 December, aged forty-nine, and is buried at St Michael's in Blackrock. Mary Everest Boole went on to write about mathematics teaching in her own right, and their five daughters included a novelist, a chemist and the first woman professor of chemistry in England.

On the walk

We pass the university he helped open and the streets he crossed to lecture each day, and we tell the story of the wet walk that killed him. You are standing where the algebra behind your phone was written.