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George Boole was the first to devise an effective system for working out logical arguments using the tools of mathematics.
The Life of George Boole
Born on November 2, 1815, in Lincoln, England, George understood that the only way out of poverty was to educate himself. His father taught him what he
knew of mathematics, and he then began teaching himself. At the age of 16 he
managed to secure a teaching position to help supplement his family income.
At the age of 20 he opened his own school in Lincoln.
He continued his self-education, choosing to read original sources instead of textbooks, studying the works of 17th century mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace and Joseph Louis Lagrange. By 1839 he wrote his first original paper about differential equations and invariances and began to publish his work in The Cambridge Mathematical Journal. In 1844 he was awarded a medal by the Royal Society for the contribution of a paper he published that examined the interplay of techniques in distant algebra and calculus. George continued to apply the ideas of abstract algebra to logic, and devised a system in which logical arguments were written as mathematical expressions. His system was separated into quantities, symbolized by letters and operations. In his 1847 publication Mathematical Analysis of Logic, he argued that logic is a part of mathematics and the strength of his publications landed him a professorship in mathematics at Queens College, Ireland, in 1849. He continued to work on his symbolic logic and published a more careful exposition of these ideas in the 1854 An Investigation into the Laws of Thought. He studied logic and probability until his death from pneumonia on December 8, 1864, in Ballintemple, Ireland. |
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