The Life and Work of George Boole: A Prelude to the Digital Age by Desmond MacHale (PDF)

Description

* Founder of the field of Computer Science* 150th Anniversary of his deathThis book is the first full-length biography of George Boole (1815–1864), who has been variously described as the founder of pure mathematics, father of computer science and discoverer of symbolic logic. Boole is mostly remembered as a mathematician and logician whose work found application in computer science long after his death, but this biography reveals Boole as much more than a mathematical genius; he was a child prodigy, self-taught linguist and practical scientist, turbulent academic and devoted teacher, social reformer and poet, psychologist and humanitarian, religious thinker and good family man – truly a nineteenth-century polymath.George Boole was born in Lincoln, England, the son of a struggling shoemaker. Boole was forced to leave school at the age of sixteen and never attended a university. He taught himself languages, natural philosophy and mathematics. After his father’s business failed he supported the entire family by becoming an assistant teacher, eventually opening his own boarding school in Lincoln. He began to produce original mathematical research and, in 1844, he was awarded the first gold medal for mathematics by the Royal Society.Boole was deeply interested in the idea of expressing the workings of the human mind in symbolic form, and his two books on this subject, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854) form the basis of today’s computer science and electronic circuitry. He also made important contributions to areas of mathematics such as invariant theory (of which he was the founder), differential and difference equations and probability. Much of the “new mathematics” now studied by children in school – set theory, binary numbers and Boolean algebra, has its origins in Boole’s work.In 1849, Boole was appointed first professor of mathematics in Ireland’s new Queen’s College (now University College) Cork and taught and worked there until his tragic and premature death in 1864. In 1855, he had married Mary Everest, a niece of the man after whom the world’s highest mountain is named. The Booles had five remarkable daughters including Alicia, a mathematician, Lucy, a professor of chemistry, and Ethel (Voynich), a novelist and author of The Gadfly.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “MacHale’s book is a major achievement….and deserves to be a bestseller.” (Times Higher Education Supplement) About the Author Desmond MacHale is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at University College Cork, where Boole was the first Professor of Mathematics.Ian Stewart

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐**********. I gave this book five stars but it is worth ten. I own the original edition of the 1980s. The copy of the original edition that arrived from Ireland had this musty smell as if it had been for a long time in a humid storage space. These books were apparently not getting sold. That reminds me of Boole’s theories. It is now commonly assumed that Boole tried to explain how we rationally think and utterly failed. Instead, someone like Frege is now something of a cult hero (I am told that, in spite of his antisemitic views, Frege is worshiped in intellectual circles in Israel, go figure). Frege is a total disaster, as far as I am concerned. He went half mad and did not publish for years. I know exactly why. I would have gone mad too thinking the thoughts he did. Have you read Frege? His scholarship is like what German scholarship, otherwise truly excellent and the very best across the board (I am a devoted admirer and in some ways a product of it, having studied in Germany), can sometimes be: deep, intense, dark, intense, brooding, very intense, dour, very intense, devoid of all lightness of being and spark of creativity. You got the message. Oh, did I forget to mention that it is sometimes a little intense? Georg Cantor went made too. If it was not because of his wayward and impossible thinking about the concept of infinity, it should have been. Nothing of it makes any sense. Infinity is fundamental to the human condition. But it requires a much more delicate approach. Just consider Abel, a true mathematical genius. He hated divergent (infinite) series (like 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 +….[the result is no doubt minus one]). Yet divergent series hold the key to an understanding of the physical universe. I do not understand how they can name a prestigious mathematics prize after someone who called divergent series “the work of the devil.” Mr. Niels Henrik Abel, divergent series hold the key to how the physical universe (which I am sure must be infinite, no doubt about it, I will tell you why) is constituted. How Abel was so anal retentive about divergent series I have no clue. Euler loved them. Well, still, Abel was a genius in other ways, so it is probably OK to name a prize after him.I have read the original edition of this book from cover to cover and consulted it innumerable times. It is one of my cherished possessions. This is scholarship of the highest caliber. And I never cease to be impressed by the accomplishments of the Boole descendants. Then again, the author completely fails to comprehend the significance of Boole. Yet, I do not mean this as a criticism at all. This is the fate that befell Boole. Everyone goes starry-eyed over the significance of his digital mathematics and the billions if not trillions of dollars involved in the digital industry. Did anybody say “money”? Was it you? Or you? Well, I understand. Is it not always about the money? Instead of elaborating further, I just reproduce my review of the recent publication of Boole’s lecture on Newton by MIT press (author: Brendan Dooley) and renew my plea to bring good old George home and bury him next to Newton in Westminster Abbey. I am sure that these Lincolnshire lads have a lot to talk about. Boole is so completely misunderstood. Leo Depuydt (Brown University)So here it is:”It is now generally assumed that Boole tried to explain how we think rationally and failed. Yet, all think that he created an algebra that allows us to get totally addicted to social media. What would the world be without Boolean searches on Google? And then all those billions of transistors firing through gates in a super computer. Wow, I am so impressed! Is it important? Well, let’s all think about that. Yet, when it comes to rational human intelligence, Boole did not fail as everyone assumes. He took us most of the way there. Although Boole thought of his theory as mathematical, I am convinced that it is a theory of physics with its own digital mathematics, a mathematics created by Boole. Just as Newton discovered the laws governing the motions of the celestial bodies in the universe, Boole formulated the laws governing rational human intelligence in the brain. Boole’s theory is worth not one but two Nobel prize in physics. Russell famously stated that Boole was the inventor of pure mathematics. Everybody quotes it. It was a really nice complement (Russell somewhat backtracked about it when asked in the fifties at the occasion of the Boole centennial, come on, a little jealous, Bertrand?). But Russell had recognized something remarkable. Yet he had no idea what he was talking about. And I do not mean this as a criticism. “Pure mathematics” is a term without a meaning. The only man (or woman) to ever understand Boole’s transcendental genius was John Venn of the University of Cambridge’s Caius College fame. Venn more or less stated that it only extremely rarely happens that a person can completely reinvent a field after thousands years of study just all at once. John Venn was just floored by this phenomenal strike of genius. And so am I. John, we are brothers in arms. It is not clear how Boole did it. That is why he is a transcendental genius. Will it ever be possible to understand how he did what he did? I am not sure. Like everyone else before him except John Venn, the author completely misrepresents the transcendental significance of Boole. And this is not meant as a criticism. Yet his contribution is absolutely critical to an understanding of Boole, especially Boole’s lecture about Newton. Newton is by many considered the greatest scientist of all time. But this lecture may well unite the two greatest mathematician physics scientists of all time. Let’s think about that. Let’s bring good old George home to good old England and reinter him alongside his Lincolnshire friend Sir Isaac Newton. In sum, the author is to be congratulated for a milestone achievement: publishing Boole’s lecture on Newton, an event 100% forgotten in the collective consciousness. And yet, who knows, a point of contact between the two greatest scientists of all time. “Leo Depuydt (Brown University)

⭐This is not a beginning way to study Boolean or predicate logic. It is a good biography

⭐George Boole is one of the most fascinating thinkers in history. Self taught, he created completely original mathematics. He made logic into a branch of algebra. Claude Shannon turned his math into the circuits of modern electronics. The one weakness of the book is it spends a bit too much time on fairly minor campus political issues. Boole’s 200th birthday in 2015 makes this a timely read

⭐There were accounts of his own writings that were in this book that were fascinating, and others that I believe were unnecessary.Entertaining read.

⭐There is no attempt to give readers more than a 6th-grade level of understanding of Boole’s contributions. Very rarely, an arcane equation is presented, but with no attempt to explain what it means. It is a social/cultural history that mainly consists of a compilation of letters, newspaper or journal articles, quotes from a book by Boole’s wife’s. It seems to be a source book for cultural historians of the 19th century who have the patience to read original sources that I found too boring to read. I gave this book 2 stars instead on 1 for effort.

⭐Written in a very cliched style, with a fair degree of pedestal placement (though at least some is warranted). Difficult to stay with it.

⭐Thank you!

⭐Brings Boole to lifeMacHale gives one a sense of Boole and his life with a combination of easy eruditioncontext and well chosen selection of Booles own writings

⭐Beautifully written, interweaving the personal and the mathematical

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