George Boole was born in the industrial town of Lincoln England on November 2, 1815. He was the son of a shoemaker in a low class family. Boole did not receive much formal education, but instead he was determined to be self-educated. His father taught him until the age of eight. When he had surpassed his fathers education, then a family friend stepped in and taught Boole Latin. By the age of twelve Boole was translating Latin Poetry and within the next four years he learned and became fluent in German, Italian and French. When George was at the young age of sixteen he became an assistant teacher at a nearby elementary school and by the age of twenty he opened his own school.

When Boole opened his school, he also began seriously studying mathematics. He intensely investigated the principles of Sir Isaac Newton and French mathematicians Pierre Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. Soon, he mastered the most intricate mathematical principles of the time. He pursued math in part mainly because of frustration at out of date math texts, which he could not use to properly educate his students.

At the age of twenty-four in the year 1840, Boole published his first paper on the topic of "Researches on the Theory of Analytical Transformations" in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. In 1844 Boole was given a gold medal by the Royal Society for his paper on "The Calculus of Operators." This enhanced his reputation with other British mathematicians but his big break came in 1847 when he published "The Mathematical Analysis of Logic," which introduced his early views on symbolic logic to the public** (it demonstrated that logic could be rendered as algebraic equations - Boole quotes "We ought o loner to associate Logic and Metaphysics but Logic and Mathematics"). This page helped get George Boole selected as the professor of mathematics at University College Cork (formerly known as Queen's College), which gave him much more time to write more papers. These were much more extensive, and he also continually refined his paper "The Mathematical Analysis of Logic." Boole was determined to find a way to encode logical arguments into a problem-solving language that could be manipulated and solve problems, mathematically. Eventually he came up with a simple algebra with three main basic operators: AND, OR and NOT. These formed the basis of his hypothesis and were the only ones needed to perform comparisons or basic mathematical functions. This was later known as Boolean algebra or Boolean logic. This system was published in Boole's "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities." This was published in 1854 but his ideas were not accepted well in the academic community. The American Logician, Charles Sanders Pierce, continued Boole's research for twenty years, realizing its potential in electronic circuitry. Eventually, he developed a basic electrical logic-circuit. One year after publishing this paper George Boole wedded Mary Everest, and had five daughters with her before his death from pneumonia on December 8th, 1864. Boole's work on mathematics and algebraic logic greatly affected the advancement of artificial intelligence, computer sciences and design.