Boole, George(1815–1864)
George Boole, an English mathematician and logician, is regarded by many logicians as the founder of mathematical logic. He could be called the Galileo of logic in that he definitively established the mathematical nature of logic—assuming that it was Galileo Galilei who did this for physics, rather than, say, Archimedes. He is considered to be among the five greatest logicians, the others being the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, and the Polish mathematician Alfred Tarski.
Like Aristotle, he never had the opportunity to take a course in logic. His parents' economic circumstances precluded the usual formal education. He never took a college course and, thus, never received a bachelor's degree. Nevertheless, he taught many college courses as a professor of mathematics and he received honorary doctoral degrees from such distinguished institutions as Trinity College of Dublin and Oxford University. These are among the many surprises, ironies, and paradoxes surrounding Boole's life and work.
His ambition, energy, originality, and dedication were evident even when he was a boy. By the age of twenty-six he had published the first of many articles in mathematics journals. By twenty-nine, for his 1844 article "On a General Method in Analysis," he had won the Royal Society's gold medal first prize recognizing "the most significant contribution to mathematics" submitted between 1840 and 1844.
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