Bualadh bos for genius of Boole
EVEN though he shuffled off this mortal coil more than 150 years ago, the genius of George Boole (right) is never far from my mind – and especially on those lazy occasions when I power up the PC to shop, bingewatch or book a weekend city break. The former professor of mathematics at Queen’s College Cork, now UCC, was the founder of Boolean Logic – the system of mathematical expression that forms the basis of modern computer language.
His landmark 1854 treatise ‘The Laws of Thought’, written during his Cork tenure, inspired the algebra underpinning the processing power of every computer and which still underpins the workings of the internet itself.
Boolean operators are an integral component of every search engine, a fact you might give small thanks for the next time Google enlightens you on the best hotel in Bari or how many boyfriends Britney Spears has had. (It’s Parco Dei Principei and 22, in case you’re interested.)
Yet, while the impressive bust of Boole in the central UCC quad details the adult genius, even his childhood signposted a life destined for greatness.
Starting school aged one and a half, he immediately grasped educational concepts far beyond his years, quickly grappling with the theories of Euclid, Pythagoras, Fermat and Newton.
Shortly after his second birthday, he went missing during a shopping trip with his mother and was eventually found surrounded by a crowd of people shouting difficult words at him.
The infant George was articulately spelling the correct answer and being showered with coins in reward.
Yet the man whose work would eventually change the world was, in many ways, the prototype of the absent-minded professor.
Arriving for a lecture one morning at UCC, his students found Boole pacing up and down the classroom deep in a mathematical conundrum. Not wishing to disturb their professor, 30 students sat quietly and waited. And waited.
Two hours later the class ended with Boole still pacing, utterly unaware of his charges who quietly departed for other classes. On arriving home that night, Boole exclaimed to his wife: “My dear, a most extraordinary thing happened today – no students came to my lecture.”
Interestingly, the great mathematician also dabbled in poetry. His ‘Ode To Spring’, written aged 14, is a verse offering particular promise for the climatically embattled Ireland of 2018. ‘Winter with all its storms is past/ No more the cold and bitter blast, ‘And smiling Spring will look serene Enrobed in flow’r empurpled green.’