A Brief Biography Of George Boole's Theory Of Mathematics

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George Boole was born in Lincoln, England on November 2, 1815 and died in Ballintemple, Ireland on December 8, 1864. He received a very basic education do to his family being part of the working class. But he was able to teach himself mathematics and foreign languages thanks to having access to quality books. This was for the most part the result of his father becoming the curator of the Lincoln Mechanics' Institution’s library. By the age of 16 Boole was a teacher’s aide, while also continuing to study mathematics. Not satisfied with the low wages of a teacher he shifted his focus toward the church and decided to become a clergyman. For four years he prepared, learning French, German, and Italian. Soon after, his parents would persuade him to go back to teaching. Thankfully the languages he learned would be helpful later in mathematics. Three years later at 19 years old, Boole opens a small private school in Lincoln. For the next 15 years Boole would remain a schoolmaster. This is when he would be inspired by reading the works of Laplace and Lagrange. In the course of that time (1838) he would write his first mathematical paper and its subject would be the calculus of variations. As a result, in 1841 Boole founded a new branch of mathematics called Invariant Theory; this would later inspire Einstein and his theory of relativity. This work became so well known that later on in 1849 at the age of 35, he would be appointed as Professor of Mathematics at the newly opened Queen's University in Cork, Ireland. A year after writing his first mathematical paper Boole traveled to Cambridge, where he would meet with the editor of the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. Boole met with a man by the name of Duncan F Gregory. Gregory would then beg...

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...ted itself to a depiction of electrical circuits switching. They revealed that the binary numbers (0 and 1), combined through Boolean algebra, could be used to analyze electrical switching circuits and ultimately used to design electronic computers.
From 1855 to 1864 were the final 10 years of Boole’s career. He published 17 papers on mathematics while only two mathematical books during this time. One book focused on differential equations (Treatise on Differential Equations in 1859) and the other on the calculus of finite difference equations (Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences in 1860). Both of the books were considered to be very modern and were used at Cambridge. After Boole’s death on December 8, 1864 another paper on mathematics and a revised book on differential equations that give significant importance to singular solutions, were also published.

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