George Boole (1815-1864) was an English mathematician and logician, largely self-taught, who became the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork, in Ireland. The MacTutor archive records that he was born in Lincoln, England, in 1815 and died in County Cork in 1864.
Boole’s lasting contribution was to treat logic as a branch of mathematics. According to MacTutor, “in 1854 he published An investigation into the Laws of Thought, on Which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities.” In it he developed an algebra in which symbols stand for classes or propositions and the operations behave like a calculus of reasoning.
This system, now called Boolean algebra, works with values that can be combined and manipulated according to fixed rules, much as ordinary numbers are. Boole showed that the laws of correct reasoning could be written as equations and solved, giving logic a precise, symbolic form.
In Boole’s own century the work was treated mainly as a contribution to pure logic and philosophy. Only later, when Claude Shannon connected it to electrical switching circuits in the 1930s, did Boole’s algebra of two values become the mathematical foundation of digital hardware and computer logic.