George Boole was born in Lincoln, England, in 1815.

His father was a struggling lower-class

tradesman, so Boole had only a common school education, but he managed to teach himself
Greek and Latin. Later, while working as an elementary-school teacher, he learned mathematics
by reading the works of Laplace and Lagrange, studied foreign languages, and, through his
friend De Morgan, became interested in formal logic. In 1847, Boole published a pamphlet
entitled The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, which De Morgan praised as epoch making. In his
work, Boole maintained that the essential character of mathematics lies in its form rather than in
its content; mathematics is not (as some dictionaries today still assert) merely “the science of
measurement and number,” but, more broadly, any study consisting of symbols along with
precise rules of operation upon those symbols, the rules being subject only to the requirement of
inner consistency. Two years later, Boole was appointed professor of mathematics at the newly
founded Queen’s College in Cork, Ireland. In 1854, Boole expanded and clarified his earlier
work of 1847 into a book entitled Investigation of the Laws of Thought, in which he established
both formal logic and a new algebra—the algebra of sets known today as Boolean algebra. In
more recent times, Boolean algebra has found a number of applications, such as to the theory of
electric switching circuits. In 1859 Boole published his Treatise on Differential Equations, and
then, in 1860, his Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences. The latter book has remained a
standard work in its subject right into present times. Boole died in Cork in 1864.
Augustus De Morgan, whose name appears in several places elsewhere in our book, was born
(blind in one eye) in 1806 in Madras, where his father was