George Boole - Essay

George Boole - Essay

Michael Umphrey
Mathematics: Mr. Hokenburg



George Boole



My favorite Mathematician is George Boole . He was born on November 2nd in 1815 in the English industrial town of Lincoln, His father loved to do math. He was really good at math and at age 8 was smarter than his dad. A family friend taught him how to speak Latin and within a few years he was able to translate Latin poems to English. When he turned 13 he was fluent in German, Italian, and French and French. When he was 16 he became and assistant teacher and at 20 he opened his own school. Over the next few years learning on mathematical journals borrowed from local Mechanic’s Institute. He struggled with Isaac Newton's 'Principia' and the works of 18th and 19th century French mathematicians Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. He had soon mastered the most intricate mathematical principles of his day. At the age of 24, George Boole published his Math Paper in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. Over the next ten years he wrote a steady stream of original articles and began to push the limits of mathematics. In 1844 he was concentrating on the uses of combined algebra and calculus to process infinitely small and large figures, and, in that same year, received a Royal Society medal for his contributions to analysis. He soon began to see the ways for applying his algebra to the solution of logical problems. His 1847 work not only expanded on another mathematician’s earlier speculations between logic and math but also said that logic was principally a type of mathematics, rather than philosophy. It was this paper that won him, not only the admiration of a famous logician Augustus de Morgan. Without a school George Boole began to look deeper into his own work, concentrating on refining his 'Mathematical Analysis', and determined to find a way to encode logical arguments into an indicative language that could be manipulated and solved mathematically. He came up with a type of algebra, the...

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