Desmond MacHale

This book, aimed at the general reader and now available again, is the first full-length biography of George Boole (1815–1864) who has been variously described as the founder of pure mathematics, one of the fathers of computer science and discoverer of symbolic logic. Boole is mostly remembered as a mathematician and logician whose work found application in computer science long after his death, but this biography reveals Boole as much more than a mathematical genius; he was a child prodigy, self-taught linguist and practical scientist, turbulent academic and devoted teacher, social reformer and poet, psychologist and humanitarian, religious thinker and good family man – truly a nineteenth-century polymath.