George Boole

George Boole George Boole was one of the most brilliant mathematicians England has produced. He was born on Nov 2, 1815 at Lincoln England to John Boole and Mary Ann Joyce. He was born into the lowest economic stratum of society. The lower classes into whose ranks Boole had been born simply didn’t exist in the eye of the upper class. It is said that he was born in the wrong time, in the wrong place, and definitely in the wrong class. His father John used to make shoes but he was much interested in science and in particular the application of mathematics to scientific instruments. The family was not well off, partly because John’s love of science and mathematics meant that he didn’t devote the energy to developing his business in the way he might have done. Boole was lucky enough to have a father who passed along his own love of math. Young George took to learning like a politician to a pay rise and, by the age of eight, had outgrown his father's self-taught limits. Due to poverty and having been born in lower strata Boole could not get himself enrolled in a school of good repute. At that very time knowledge of Latin was considered to be important but no Latin was taught in the school where Boole was permitted to attend. Boole decided that he would learn Latin and a friend of his father helped him a little bit but Boole took the rest journey of learning Latin all alone. By 12, he had mastered enough Latin to translate a given paragraph into English properly. Boole learned his early lesson in mathematics from his father, an amateur mathematician and optical instrument maker. His father wanted him to join the business but after finishing his schooling Boole took a commercial course. By 16, he became a school teacher. This was rather forced on him since his father's business collapsed and he found himself having to support financially his parents, brothers and sister. He spent four years teaching elementary school. Boole later decided to become a clergy man so as to support his family in a better way and thus trained himself in the language of French, German and Italian and got mastery over it. At the age of 20, Boole opened up a school to prepare his pupils in mathematics. Over the next few years, Boole prepared himself with the tough mathematical courses with the help of mathematical journals borrowed from the local Mechanic's Institute. Boole struggled with Isaac Newton's 'Principia' and the works of 18th and 19th century French mathematicians Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. He later mastered himself the Mecanuque Cleste of Laplace and Mecanique Analytique of Lagrange by his own unaided efforts. In 1837, Boole submitted some of his work to the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. The style of presentation and its originality impressed Gregory and they become a good friend for life. David Gregory advised him to take a formal course of mathematics at Cambridge but he was unable to take Duncan Gregory's advice and study courses at Cambridge as he required the income from his school to look after his parents. In the summer of 1840 he had opened a boarding school in Lincoln and again the whole family had moved with him. He began publishing regularly in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal and his interests were influenced by Duncan Gregory as he began to study algebra. By 1844 he was concentrating on the uses of combined algebra and calculus to process infinitely small and large figures, and, in that same year, received a Royal Society medal for his contributions to analysis. In 1847, Boole published a pamphlet The Mathematical Analysis of Logic which bridged the gap previously separating mathematics from formal logic. This development was crucial in advancing the potential powers of the analytic engines of Babbage. It was this paper that won him, not only the admiration of the distinguished logician Augustus de Morgan but a place on the faculty of Ireland's Queen's College. This was his first public contribution to the vast subject which his work inaugurated and in which he was to win enduring fame for the boldness and perspicacity of his vision. Boole reduced logic to an extremely easy and simple type of algebra. This book laid the foundation of new branch of mathematics called Boolean algebra. In 1849, he was appointed Professor of mathematics there. He taught there for the rest of his life, gaining a reputation as an outstanding and dedicated teacher. This post made him financially independent and he made excellent use of his comparative freedom from financial worry. Without a school to run, Boole began to delve deeper into his own work, concentrating on refining his 'Mathematical Analysis', and determined to find a way to encode logical arguments into an indicative language that could be manipulated and solved mathematically. He came up with a type of linguistic algebra, the three most basic operations of which were (and still are) AND, OR and NOT. It was these three functions that formed the basis of his premise, and were the only operations necessary to perform comparisons or basic mathematical functions. In May 1851 Boole was elected as Dean of Science, a role he carried out conscientiously. By this time he had already met Mary Everest his would be wife with whom he married on 11 September 1855. It proved a very happy marriage with five daughters. In 1854, he published his work on logic An investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. This research was based on a binary approach processing only two objects- the yes-no, true- false, on-off, zero-one approach. In 1859, he published his Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences. He published around 50 papers and was one of the first to investigate the basic properties of numbers, such as the distributive property, that underlie the subject of algebra. An American logician Charles Sanders Pierce spend more than 20 years modifying and expanding Boole’s treatise realising the potential for use in electronic circuitry and eventually designing a fundamental electrical logic circuit. He did introduce Boolean algebra into his university logic philosophy courses. The development of Boolean algebra was fundamental to mathematical logic, and is the basic logical tool in designing modern computer. Unfortunately, Boole's life was cut short when he died of a 'feverish cold' at the age of 49, after walking 2 miles through the rain to get to class and then lecturing in wet clothes. He died on December 8, 1864 in Ballintemple in Ireland. After his death his wife Mary Boole applied some of the ideas which she had acquired from him to rationalizing the education of young children. SEND YOUR COMMENTS TO RAJESH KUMAR THAKUR rkthakur1974@gmail.com