-
Boole was born in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England, the son of John Boole Sr (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.
-
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. Four years later he took over Hall's Academy in Waddington, outside Lincoln, following the death of Robert Hall.
-
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.
-
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 Polytheism, especially amongst the ancient Egyptians, and Persians, and in modern India
-
In 1857, Boole published the treatise On the Comparison of Transcendents, with Certain Applications to the Theory of Definite Integrals, in which he studied the sum of residues of a rational function.
-
Boole became a prominent local figure, an admirer of John Kaye, the bishop. He took part in the local campaign for early closing. With E. R. Larken and others he set up a building society in 1847. He associated also with the Chartist Thomas Cooper, whose wife was a relation.
-
With Boole in 1847 and 1854 began the algebra of logic, or what is now called Boolean algebra. Boole’s original and remarkable general symbolic method of logical inference, fully stated in Laws of Thought (1854), enables one, given any propositions involving any number of terms, to draw conclusions that are logically contained in the premises.
-
On the basis of his publications, Boole in 1849 was appointed professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, County Cork, even though he had no university degree.
-
In 1854 he published An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, which he regarded as a mature statement of his ideas.
-
He married Mary Everest, niece of Sir George Everest, for whom the mountain is named. The Booles had five daughters.
-
Boole was awarded the Keith Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855
-
In 1857 Boole was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
-
In 1857, Boole published the treatise On the Comparison of Transcendents, with Certain Applications to the Theory of Definite Integrals, in which he studied the sum of residues of a rational function.
-
In late November 1864, Boole walked, in heavy rain, from his home at Lichfield Cottage in Ballintemple to the university, a distance of three miles, and lectured wearing his wet clothes. He soon became ill, developing pneumonia. Boole's condition worsened and on 8 December 1864, he died of fever-induced pleural effusion.