George Boole - Early Life

Early Life

George Boole's father, John Boole (1779–1848), was a tradesman in Lincoln and gave him lessons. He had an elementary 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 took up a junior teaching position in Doncaster, at Heigham's School, being at this point the breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings. He taught also in Liverpool, briefly.

Boole participated in the local Mechanics Institute, the Lincoln Mechanics' Institution, which was founded in 1833. Edward Bromhead, who knew John Boole through the Institution, helped George Boole with mathematics books; and he was given the calculus text of Sylvestre François Lacroix by Rev. George Stevens Dickson, of St Swithin Lincoln. It took him many years to master calculus, however, without a teacher.

At age 19 Boole successfully established his own school at Lincoln. Four years later he took over Hall's Academy, at Waddington, outside Lincoln, following the death of Robert Hall. In 1840 he moved back to Lincoln, where he ran a boarding school.

Boole became a prominent local figure, an admirer of John Kaye, the bishop. He took part in the local campaign for early closing. With E. R. Larken and others he set up a building society in 1847. He associated also with the Chartist Thomas Cooper, whose wife was a relation.

From 1838 onwards Boole was making contacts with sympathetic British academic mathematicians, and reading more widely. He studied algebra in the form of symbolic methods, as these were understood at the time, and began to publish research papers.

Read more about this topic:  George Boole

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
    And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
    I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
    Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
    Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
    And thought of him I love.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro’ its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round.
    Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)