Who is George Boole?

Known as the ‘grandfather of the digital world’, George Boole is a legendary mathematician - and one of Lincoln’s greatest minds.

On the 2 November 1815, George Boole was born on Silver Street in Lincoln. A self-taught philosopher, logician and mathematician, Boole was just 16 years old when he got his first job as a teacher. 
 

Early Life

The son of a shoemaker, George Boole was christened at St Swithin's Church in Lincoln. As a young boy, George received a primary school education, alongside some extra lessons from his father. Due to a decline in business, he had very little formal or academic teaching but was clearly extremely clever. At age 16, he was able to become a teacher - and became the sole provider for his family.

Boole attended the Lincoln Mechanics' Institute, which was situated with Greyfriars in Lincoln. Common in the 19th century, these institutes provided education for the working man through lending libraries, lecture theatres, classrooms and labs. Students would have access to an assortment of courses and technical material, allowing them to better their education and future prospects. It was at this time that a friend of his father, Edward Bromhead, provided Boole with some maths books and the minister from the church gave him a calculous text. 

By the time he turned 19, George Boole was able to establish his own school, close to St Swithin's Church. Four years later, he moved out of the city to takeover a school in Waddington. He returned to Lincoln in 1840, opening his second school on Pottergate, which is where he also resided. It was at this school that Boole conducted his last teaching in Lincoln and where he won the Gold Medal from the Royal Society, in 1844. 

An active member of local societies, George often collaborated with fellow mathematicians. Keen to further his skills in higher mathematics and, with limited opportunities in Lincoln, he took up a professorship at Queen's College in Cork. He moved to Ireland in 1849, and it was here that he met his wife and started a family.

Despite living in Ireland, Boole continued his involvement in social causes and maintained connections with Lincoln throughout his life. To honour his legacy, there are two plaques dedicated to him in the city; one at his former home at 3 Pottergate, and one on the original site of St Swithin's Church. In 2022, a new statue of Boole teaching two children was unveiled at Lincoln Train Station.
 

Booleon Logic

As well as teaching, Boole worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic. He published around 50 articles and several separate publications in his lifetime, many of which contained Boolean algebra. ​ 

In 1854, he published his most important paper “The Laws of Thought”. This research piece documented the relationship between algebra and logic – a study which paved the way for today’s computer technology. Although he was recognised as a genius in his own lifetime, it was not until almost a century later that the far-reaching implications of Boole’s work would become apparent.

An American electronics engineer named Claude Shannon realised Boole’s logic could be applied in producing electrical circuits: a discovery that started the digital revolution. Today, even the most advanced computers and smart devices still depend on Boolean logic.
 

5 Facts about George Boole

George Boole was the inventor of “Boolean Logic” and unwitting grandfather to our digital culture. You may know him from his pioneering work, but here are 5 facts about George Boole that you may be less familiar with.
 

1. Boole was a self-taught linguist

Aged 10, George’s talent for languages was apparent and his father John arranged for additional tuition in Latin. Having mastered this language, he went on to teach himself Greek, French, German, and Italian. It’s not surprising that his command of language led him to also master algebra and later devise Boolean logic – the building blocks of our digital world today.

2. Boole won a Royal Medal

The Royal Society has given Royal Medals for outstanding achievements in biological, physical and applied sciences since 1825. In 1844, George Boole was awarded the Royal Medal for Mathematics for his paper ‘On a General Method of Analytics’. This paper, and the award of the prestigious medal, drew the attention of Britain’s leading mathematicians and would lead to his professorship at Queen’s College Cork (now University College Cork) in Ireland 5 years later.
 

3. Boole’s favourite passage from the Bible is the calling of Samuel

’The Teaching Window’ in Lincoln Cathedral stands in memory of George Boole, who died at the young age of 49. At the request of his widow, Mary Everest, this beautiful window depicts God's calling of the prophet Samuel - one of Boole's favourite passages from the Bible. Funds for the window were raised by George's friends in Lincoln, after his untimely death in 1864. 

The Teaching Window can be found in the fourth window of the north wall of the cathedral. 
 

4. George and Mary Boole had five daughters

George and Mary Boole married in Cork in 1855. The couple went on to have five daughters: Mary Ellen, Margaret, Alicia, Lucy, and Ethel Lilian.

Boole’s biographer Desmond McHale comments that Boole ‘must have seen the irony of a man with an interest in probability fathering five daughters in a row’.
 

5. George Boole may have foreseen the digital revolution

Boole was dedicated to ‘understanding the thought processes of the human mind’. His work explored logical thought, using symbolic logic.

In Professor Desmond McHale’s biography of Boole, he cites a paraphrase of George: “calculation and reasoning, like weaving and ploughing, are work, not for human souls, but for clever combinations of iron and wood.”

Indeed, in 1938 Claude Shannon published a paper - drawing on Boole’s 1884 book ‘The Mathematical Analysis of Logic’ - on which modern digital computer circuits are based.