November | Monday | 02, 2015 :: Google celebrated mathematician George Boole’s 200th birthday with an animated doodle on its homepage. His legacy of Boolean algebra laid the foundations of digital age.
George Boole ( 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was an English mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age.
Boole was born in Lincolnshire, England. His father, John Boole (1779–1848), was a tradesman in Lincoln and gave him lessons. He had a primary school education, but little further formal and academic teaching. William Brooke, a bookseller in Lincoln, may have helped him with Latin, which he may also have learned at the school of Thomas Bainbridge. He was self-taught in modern languages. At age 16 Boole became the breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings, taking up a junior teaching position in Doncaster at Heigham’s School. He taught briefly in Liverpool.
