page_title: George Boole
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: George Boole / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: 3 Pottergate. Largely mid to late 18th century house on Pottergate with traces of its Medieval origins inside. It was once home to George Boole http://www.rogerparsons.info/george/boole.html mathematician, philosopher and inventor of Boolean Algebra .... the basis of modern computer arithmetic. A plaque 657131 facing Pottergate recognises this famous Lincolnshire son.
context_page_description: George Boole was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age. Boole maintained that:
  No general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognise, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.
context_section_description: Boole was born in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England, the son of John Boole senior (1779–1848), a shoemaker and Mary Ann Joyce. He had a primary school education, and received lessons from his father, but due to a serious decline in business, he had little further formal and academic teaching. William Brooke, a bookseller in Lincoln, may have helped him with Latin, which he may also have learned at the school of Thomas Bainbridge. He was self-taught in modern languages. In fact, when a local newspaper printed his translation of a Latin poem, a scholar accused him of plagiarism under the pretence that he was not capable of such achievements. At age 16, Boole became the breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings, taking up a junior teaching position in Doncaster at Heigham's School. He taught briefly in Liverpool.
  Boole participated in the Mechanics Institute, in the Greyfriars, Lincoln, which was founded in 1833. Edward Bromhead, who knew John Boole through the institution, helped George Boole with mathematics books and he was given the calculus text of Sylvestre François Lacroix by the Rev. George Stevens Dickson of St Swithin's, Lincoln. Without a teacher, it took him many years to master calculus.
  At age 19, Boole successfully established his own school in Lincoln: Free School Lane.  He continued making his living by running schools until he was in his thirties. Four years later he took over Hall's Academy in Waddington, outside Lincoln, following the death of Robert Hall. In 1840 he moved back to Lincoln, where he ran a boarding school. Boole immediately became involved in the Lincoln Topographical Society, serving as a member of the committee, and presenting a paper entitled "On the origin, progress, and tendencies of polytheism", especially amongst the ancient Egyptians and Persians, and in modern India. on 30 November 1841.
  Boole became a prominent local figure, an admirer of John Kaye, the bishop. He took part in the local campaign for early closing. With Edmund Larken and others he set up a building society in 1847. He associated also with the Chartist Thomas Cooper, whose wife was a relation.
  From 1838 onwards Boole was making contacts with sympathetic British academic mathematicians and reading more widely. He studied algebra in the form of symbolic methods, as far as these were understood at the time, and began to publish research papers. After receiving positive feedback on his publications, he considered attending the University of Cambridge, but decided against attending when told he would have to start with the standard undergraduate courses and discontinue his own research.
caption: Boole's House and School at 3 Pottergate in Lincoln
exif: {}