"The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed."
George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, 1854
George Boole was born in 1815, the same year as Augusta Ada Byron, the poet's daughter. One into aristocracy, under the scandal of her father's name and the suffocating precision of her mother's curriculum. The other into a cobbler's shop in Lincoln, England. George's father, John, made shoes for a living but telescopes for love. Together, as father and son, they built kaleidoscopes, cameras and microscopes, grinding lenses and assembling sundials. John Boole had a mind that often wandered to the curious instead of focusing on what paid. George inherited this tendency: the curiosity, the obsessive focus, and the poverty.
George grew up working class in a time when class dictated whether you were permitted to think for a living. He attended a handful of undistinguished schools. His father taught him the basics of mathematics. A local bookseller was said to have taught him Latin. Everything else he taught himself. Greek, French, German and Italian. By fourteen, he had translated a poem by the Greek poet Meleager and published it in the Lincoln Herald. The translation was so accomplished that a local schoolmaster publicly accused him of plagiarism. The accusation was not about the quality of the work. It was about the source. A cobbler's son could not possibly know Greek.
At sixteen, George found himself the sole breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings after his father's shoe-making business finally collapsed. He took a teaching position at a school in Doncaster. He was not yet old enough to vote. He was already supporting four people. And at night, after the students retired to the dormitory and the schoolhouse was quiet, he opened his mathematics books and kept going.
He spent the next fifteen years teaching. He ran his own school by nineteen. The days belonged to the children, fees, lessons, discipline. The nights belonged to calculus. Working his way through Lacroix's Differential and Integral Calculus, without a tutor or professor to guide him, a feat that would take Cambridge undergraduates years to accomplish even with expert tutelage. It took him longer. Of course it did. But he got there in the end. In his mid-twenties he was publishing original mathematical research and in 1844, at age twenty-eight, he won the Royal Medal from the Royal Society. This was the first time this prize had been awarded for mathematics. He still did not have a university degree. He had never attended a single university lecture.
Cambridge offered him a place. Not a chair, not a fellowship. A place as an undergraduate, but he declined. They wanted him to sit through years of course work he had already surpassed, and complete the standard curriculum like any other student. He was already writing mathematical literature that his would-be professors were referencing in their work. He stayed in Lincoln and kept teaching.
In 1849, Queen's College Cork, a new university in Ireland, appointed him as its first professor of mathematics. He did not have a degree. His appointment was extraordinary and almost certainly controversial, but his standing in mathematics and the Royal Medal spoke for themselves. He was thirty-three years old, a self-taught cobbler's son, holding a chair of mathematics, and he had an idea that struck him when he was seventeen, and had been forming ever since: that thought itself obeyed mathematical laws.