A shoemaker's self-taught son wrote the logic every computer now runs
George Boole left formal schooling early, taught himself languages and calculus, and was supporting his family by sixteen. In 1847 he turned logic into algebra built on true and false. Nearly a century later Claude Shannon used that algebra to design relay circuits, and digital computers followed.
Boole was born on 2 November 1815 in Lincoln, England, to John Boole, a shoemaker, and Mary Ann Joyce. When his father's business declined sharply, formal lessons ended after primary school. He picked up Latin with possible help from a local bookseller and learned modern languages on his own; when a newspaper printed his translation of a Latin poem, one scholar accused him of plagiarism, doubting a youth could manage it. Through the Lincoln Mechanics' Institute he obtained a calculus textbook by Lacroix and spent years working through it without a teacher.
At 19 he opened his own school in Lincoln, later took over an academy in nearby Waddington, and from 1840 ran a boarding school back in Lincoln. He threw himself into civic life, campaigning for early shop closing and co-founding a building society in 1847. Meanwhile, from 1838, he corresponded with academic mathematicians and published research on symbolic algebra. In 1844 his paper on a general method in analysis won the Royal Society's first gold prize for mathematics.
His Mathematical Analysis of Logic introduced symbolic logic, recasting what had been a study of language as equations using binary values and logical operators. That Boolean algebra was extended by Charles Sanders Peirce and William Stanley Jevons, and Shannon and Victor Shestakov later applied it to electromechanical relays. He also wrote treatises on differential equations and on finite differences, publishing about 50 articles in all.
In 1849 Queen's College, Cork, in Ireland, made him its first professor of mathematics. There he met Mary Everest, niece of George Everest, and married her in 1855; she later wrote educational books based on his ideas. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1857 and died in Cork on 8 December 1864 after a fever. Among later relatives is Geoffrey Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on neural networks.
Source: George Boole
