Boole's ideas later gained practical applications when Claude Shannon and Victor Shestakov employed Boolean algebra to optimize the design of electromechanical relay systems, leading to the development of modern electronic digital computers.

University College Cork celebrated the 200th anniversary of Boole's birth in 2015, highlighting his significant impact on the digital age.

[2] In fact, when a local newspaper printed his translation of a Latin poem, a scholar accused him of plagiarism under the pretence that he was not capable of such achievements.

[10] At age 16, Boole became the breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings, taking up a junior teaching position in Doncaster at Heigham's School.

[1] Boole immediately became involved in the Lincoln Topographical Society, serving as a member of the committee, and presenting a paper entitled "On the origin, progress, and tendencies of polytheism, especially amongst the ancient Egyptians and Persians, and in modern India".

[23] In March 1863, Boole leased Litchfield Cottage, Cork, the house in which he would live with his wife Mary until his death in December of the following year.

In 1844, Boole's paper "On a General Method in Analysis" won the first gold prize for mathematics awarded by the Royal Society.

[29] Boole's first published paper was "Researches in the theory of analytical transformations, with a special application to the reduction of the general equation of the second order", printed in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal in February 1840 (Volume 2, No.

In 1857, Boole published the treatise "On the Comparison of Transcendent, with Certain Applications to the Theory of Definite Integrals",[36] in which he studied the sum of residues of a rational function.

[40] Among his many innovations is his principle of wholistic reference, which was later, and probably independently, adopted by Gottlob Frege and by logicians who subscribe to standard first-order logic.

But in Boole's original system, + was a partial operation: in the language of set theory it would correspond only to disjoint union of subsets.

Later authors changed the interpretation, commonly reading it as exclusive or, or in set theory terms symmetric difference; this step means that addition is always defined.

[45][20] In late November 1864, Boole walked, in heavy rain, from his home at Lichfield Cottage in Ballintemple[46] to the university, a distance of three miles, and lectured wearing his wet clothes.

[52] The library, underground lecture theatre complex and the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics[53] at University College Cork are named in his honour.

The conception of a Boolean algebra structure on equivalent statements of a propositional calculus is credited to Hugh MacColl (1877), in work surveyed 15 years later by Johnson.

In 1937 Shannon went on to write a master's thesis, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which he showed how Boolean algebra could optimise the design of systems of electromechanical relays then used in telephone routing switches.

Employing the properties of electrical switches to process logic is the basic concept that underlies all modern electronic digital computers.

Victor Shestakov at Moscow State University (1907–1987) proposed a theory of electric switches based on Boolean logic even earlier than Claude Shannon in 1935 on the testimony of Soviet logicians and mathematicians Sofya Yanovskaya, Gaaze-Rapoport, Roland Dobrushin, Lupanov, Medvedev and Uspensky.

Hence, Boolean algebra became the foundation of practical digital circuit design; and Boole, via Shannon and Shestakov, provided the theoretical grounding for the Information Age.

[57]"Boole's legacy surrounds us everywhere, in the computers, information storage and retrieval, electronic circuits and controls that support life, learning and communications in the 21st century.

To mark the bicentenary year, University College Cork joined admirers of Boole around the world to celebrate his life and legacy.

Boole's views were given in four published addresses: The Genius of Sir Isaac Newton; The Right Use of Leisure; The Claims of Science; and The Social Aspect of Intellectual Culture.

[60] The second justified and celebrated in 1847 the outcome of the successful campaign for early closing in Lincoln, headed by Alexander Leslie-Melville, of Branston Hall.

Combining his interests in mathematics and theology, he compared the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with the three dimensions of space, and was attracted to the Hebrew conception of God as an absolute unity.

"[67][68] In addition, he stated "To infer the existence of an intelligent cause from the teeming evidence of surrounding design, to rise to the conception of a moral Governor of the World, from the study of the constitution and the moral provisions of our own nature;--these, though but the feeble steps of an understanding limited in its faculties and its materials of knowledge, are of more avail than the ambitious attempt to arrive at a certainty unattainable on the ground of natural religion.

[71] Mary Boole stated that an adolescent mystical experience provided for his life's work: My husband told me that when he was a lad of seventeen a thought struck him suddenly, which became the foundation of all his future discoveries.

It was a flash of psychological insight into the conditions under which a mind most readily accumulates knowledge ... For a few years he supposed himself to be convinced of the truth of "the Bible" as a whole, and even intended to take orders as a clergyman of the English Church.

[73] Boole was apparently disconcerted at the book's reception just as a mathematical toolset: George afterwards learned, to his great joy, that the same conception of the basis of Logic was held by Leibniz, the contemporary of Newton.

Herbert Spencer, Jowett, and Robert Leslie Ellis understood, I feel sure; and a few others, but nearly all the logicians and mathematicians ignored [953] the statement that the book was meant to throw light on the nature of the human mind; and treated the formula entirely as a wonderful new method of reducing to logical order masses of evidence about external fact.

[72] Boole maintained that:No general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognise, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.