George Boole was an English mathematician, philosopher and logician. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is now best known as the author of An Investigation of The Laws of Thought.
Father
1777-1848
1777-1848
In 1800 he went to London to finalise his training as a highly skilled cordwainer or master shoemaker. A thinker, having a thirst for knowledge, he learned bookkeeping and taught himself French and applied mathematics during that time.
He met Mary Ann Joyce in London and they married in 1806 at the Parish Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A year later they moved back to Lincoln where they set up home and he opened a shoemaker’s shop. Their marriage was a happy one and John was a devoted parent to their four children.
Despite his family responsibilities, Boole’s heart was never in his business. His love of science, literature and mathematics always took preference, at the expense of his livelihood. He achieved success in the application of mathematical principles to the construction of scientific instruments, including telescopes.
In 1831 he declared himself bankrupt. Yet he later described himself as an ‘accountant’ and audited the accounts of the Lincoln Savings Bank for 20 years. He was a founder member of the Lincoln Mechanics Institute and was its curator and librarian, until his stubborn and controversial nature caused him to resign from that position in 1835.
Following his death in 1848 he was buried in Minster Yard, to the south-east of Lincoln Cathedral.
Mother
1780-1854
1780-1854
As a young woman she found employment as a lady’s maid with the wife of a minor canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. At the age of twenty-six she married John Boole, who was three years her senior. Following their marriage they lived apart in London for six months, due to their limited circumstances.
The Booles later moved to Lincoln and after ten years Mary gave birth to George, their first child, on 2 November 1815. Mary Ann was then thirty-five. She had three further children in rapid succession – a daughter Mary Ann in 1818, a son William in 1819 and another boy called Charles in 1821.
Mary Ann Boole played an important role in the educational development of her children. Although she did not have the opportunity to benefit from a formal education, she possessed a lively mind and had a vivacious spirit. She was a gentle creature of sweet temperament, a lover of truth, goodness and beauty, with a warm and generous personality.
She shunned personal rancor or violent chastisement, believing that character could be formed best through music and family-based activities. In those ways she differed from her husband but their complementary qualities resulted in a happy and contented household.
She died and was buried beside her husband in Lincoln in 1854, aged 74 years.
Sister
1817-1887
1817-1887
Following the failure of her father’s business, her elder brother George became the sole provider for the entire family, working as a schoolteacher. From this time onwards, Mary Ann’s life was to be closely entwined with the life of her famous sibling.
When George took the bold step of managing the Waddington Academy in 1838, Mary Ann, then aged 21, moved with the rest of the family to take up residence and to help in running this boarding school.
In 1840 she faced a new challenge when George opened his own boarding school ‘for young gentlemen’ in Lincoln. By now 23, she helped out by teaching selected classes, under the careful supervision of George. Soon she developed her expertise enough to continue her career as a teacher.
In 1849, when George departed for Ireland to take up his professorship at Queen’s College Cork, Mary Ann – who never married – remained in Lincoln to look after her ageing parents.
In 1854 Mary Ann reached a turning point in her life, following the death of her mother. Through George’s contacts in Cork she became governess to the children of William Fitzgerald, Anglican Bishop of Cork. One of the children she tutored was George Francis Fitzgerald who later became a famous physicist. His work had an important influence on Einstein and his Theory of Relativity.
Mary Ann Boole died in 1887, aged 70 years.
1815-1864
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1815-1864
He was born in Lincoln on 2 November 1815, the first of four children to John and Mary Ann Boole. Delicate of health as a child and adult, he had a shy and retiring disposition, a character he retained to the end of his life. But he was also described as a favourite with ladies and a romantic at heart.
Boole received a rudimentary formal education as the son of a shoemaker, but the informal education he received from his father was hugely important in his future development. From him George learned about English literature and language structure and spent many hours helping his father to build scientific instruments. The gentle qualities of his mother also significantly helped to shape his character.
At an early age he mastered Latin, then Greek and Hebrew, later adding French, German and Italian. He was also self-taught in mathematics, physics and astronomy. Throughout his life he maintained a strong religious faith.
He worked as a teacher in Doncaster and Liverpool and opened his first school in Lincoln in 1843 at the age of 19. He was now supporting his entire family, following the collapse of his father’s business. He made his first public address that year on the works of Isaac Newton at the Lincoln Mechanics Institute.
As well as playing a major part in the work of that Institute, Boole’s keen sense of social duty was further demonstrated as a founder of a female penitents’ home and as a champion of the Lincoln Early Closing Association.
While delivering a speech to the Early Closing Association in 1847 he was described as being 'of middle stature, light complexioned, slenderly built, with a countenance in which both genius and benignity are expressed, and a manner gentle and modest, almost to womanliness.'
Boole’s first mathematical publication appeared in 1841. He was awarded a Royal Medal for ‘ … the most important contributions in the physical, biological and applied sciences’ by the Royal Society in 1844 and his first book The Mathematical Analysis of Logic was published in 1847.
Although he never earned a university degree, George Boole was appointed as first Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College Cork in 1849 at a salary of £250 per annum. Two years later he received his first honorary degree LLD from Trinity College Dublin.
Boole’s magnum opus An investigation of the Laws of Thought appeared in 1854. The following year he married Mary Everest, an eminent writer and pioneering educationalist and set up home in Cork. The couple subsequently had five daughters.
In 1857 Boole was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded the Keith Prize by the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his work on conditional probability.
Two further books followed – Differential Equations in 1859 and Finite Differences in 1860.
George Boole died tragically in 1864 at the age of 49 after walking from his home at Lichfield Cottage in Ballintemple to Queen’s College in a heavy downpour, catching a chill, from which he developed pneumonia.
Wife
1832-1916
1832-1916
Mary was a niece of John Ryall, Vice-President and Professor of Greek at Queen’s College, Cork. On a visit to her uncle there in 1850, she met her future husband for the first time. At that time George Boole was 35 and she was 18. For some years they remained friends and frequently corresponded, mainly on aspects of mathematics.
When Mary’s father died in 1855, she was left destitute. After a short engagement, Mary – then aged 23 – married George at the Parish Church at Wickwar, where her father had ministered.
After spending their honeymoon in the Wye Valley, the couple took a steamer to Waterford and journeyed on to Cork, where George was Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College. Their marriage together was very happy and Mary gave birth to five daughters between 1856 and 1864.
Mary Boole and her husband made sure that their daughters received an emancipated education. She was probably the first woman in Ireland to attend a university course, when she sat in on her husband’s lectures at Queen’s College, although accused by a certain lady of being ‘quite un-maidenly’ for doing so.
After her husband died she became librarian at Queen’s College, London, to help to support her family. Her many intellectual interests extended beyond mathematics, to philosophy, psychology and Darwinian theory, and records exist of her correspondence with Darwin.
Eccentric and unpredictable, she proved to be an outstanding teacher, tutoring privately in mathematics and developing her own progressive ideas on education. This involved the use of natural materials and physical activities – including ‘curve stitching’ – to provide young students with an imaginative concept of mathematics.
Her many publications included didactic works entitled Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and The Preparation of the Child for Science.
She died in 1916 at the age of 84.
Daughter
1856-1908
Toggle1856-1908
As part of a hugely gifted family, Mary Ellen was less remarkable than her siblings, but through her marriage to Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907) her life became very interesting.
Mary Ellen married Charles Hinton in 1881. Her husband was the eldest son of James Hinton, for whom her mother had worked as secretary for a number of years.
Soon after they married they sailed to Japan, where Charles took up a teaching post, returning later to England to become a schoolmaster at Uppingham School in Rutland.
In 1886 a major drama occurred in Mary Ellen’s life when her husband was tried for bigamy in London and for which he served some time in prison. Because of this they were forced to leave England.
In 1893 they settled in the United States, where Charles worked as an instructor in the mathematics department at Princeton University.
Mary Ellen gave birth to four sons – George, Eric, William and Sebastian.
She died in 1908.
Son-in-law
1853-1907
1853-1907
Later he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took top honours in mathematics. He studied physics in Oxford and Berlin and, following his marriage, he taught in Japan. Some time later he became a mathematics teacher at Uppingham School.
His life took a dramatic twist in 1886, when he was tried at the Old Bailey for bigamously marrying Maud Weldon, with whom he had spent a week in a King’s Cross hotel. It was alleged he was the father of twins by that lady.
After the ignominy of his court case and brief prison spell, he and his family sailed for America on the SS Tacoma where he was offered a job at Princeton University in New Jersey. While in the United States he famously invented an automatic baseball pitcher.
Hinton is best remembered for his books and his fascination with the idea of life in two or four dimensions. It is quite possible that his interest in these topics was stimulated by his mother-in-law, Mary Boole, and his mathematician sister-in-law Alicia Boole. His books included A New Era of Thought, An Episode of Flatland and The Fourth Dimension.
Charles died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Washington DC on 30 April 1907, aged only 54.
Grandson
1882-1943
ToggleGrandson
1883-c.1930
Grandson
1886-1909
Grandson
1887-1923
Daughter
1858-1935
Toggle1858-1935
Writing about his infant daughter soon after her birth, Margaret’s father George had the following to say:
'She has longer limbs and her features are much more marked [than her older sister Mary]. She is so quiet that we could not tell there was a baby in the house. It is idle perhaps to speculate on the future of a child, and yet I cannot help fancy that if she lives she will be a child of remarkable character'.
On 15 September of that year she was baptised at St. Michael’s Church of Ireland Parish Church. Sadly her father George would be buried in the adjoining churchyard when Margaret would be only six years old.
For a family steeped in mathematics and science, Margaret took a different course by marrying the artist Edward Ingram Taylor in 1885. Edward was born in London in 1866 and became a successful landscape artist, showing regularly at the Royal Academy in London.
Margaret and Edward had two sons – Geoffrey Ingram Taylor (1886-1975) and Julian Taylor (1889-1961).
In the case of the former son, the Boole gene returned with a vengeance. Young Geoffrey was to become Sir Geoffrey Taylor FRS, one of the most eminent mathematical physicists of the twentieth century.
Margaret Taylor died in 1935.
Son-in-law
1855-1921
1855-1921
Taylor operated from his studio in St John’s Wood in London, and exhibited at the Royal Academy. His style was well judged and precise and he managed to capture some outstandingly atmospheric landscape images, working mainly in watercolour. He was also distinguished by his sensitively rendered figurative pencil drawings.
His depiction of Lambert Castle is held by the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. Another work entitled Oxwich Bay, showing part of the picturesque Gower coastline in Wales hangs at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea.
However, his principal source of income was in the design and decoration of public rooms aboard ocean liners.
Ingram Taylor married George Boole’s daughter Margaret in 1855. Together they had two sons – the world-famous physicist and mathematician Geoffrey Ingram Taylor and his younger brother Julian.
Edward Ingram Taylor died in London in 1921, aged 66.
Grandson
1886-1975
Grandson
1889-1961
ToggleDaughter
1860-1940
Toggle1860-1940
Following her father’s death when she was only four years old, she later spent time living in England with her maternal grandmother and with her great uncle John Ryall in Cork. She re-joined her mother and sisters in London when she was 13.
Alicia seems to have been the only one of the five Boole siblings who inherited directly her father’s mathematical talent. At the age of eighteen her sister Mary Ellen’s husband, Charles Howard Hinton, developed her interest in four-dimensional geometry. She later introduced the mathematical term ‘polytope’ into the English language.
Due to her difficult circumstances and the prevailing attitude to women’s education, the results of her original work did not flourish. Following her marriage to Walter Stott in 1890 she initially devoted herself to her husband and two children, Leonard and Mary. Leonard went on to become one of the pioneers in the treatment of tuberculosis.
Following a later collaboration with Professor Peiter Schoute of the University of Gronigen her work was published and in July 1914 she was conferred with a richly deserved doctorate from that university.
In 1930 she resumed her pioneering work with the famous English geometer HMS Coxeter, who later moved to Canada. With him she made further discoveries of great historical significance. Being mainly self-taught she resembled her father. Perhaps her originality was also untarnished by a university education?
Alicia Stott died, aged 80 in 1940.
Son-in-law
1866-1937
1866-1937
The marriage took place in Liverpool, a then thriving city and the place where George Boole worked as a teacher in Mr Marrat’s school, at 4 Whitemill Street, after his job at Doncaster came to an end.
Although Walter’s income was not very substantial, he and Alicia seemed very happy, both sharing a passionate interest in mathematics and dedicating themselves to the welfare of their two children, Mary and Leonard.
It appears that Walter Stott accumulated an extensive library and it was in this library that Stott’s nephew Geoffrey Ingram Taylor came across a copy of Lamb’s Hydrodynamics, influencing his future career as a physicist.
A descendent of Walter Stott’s, Duncan Fraser, bequeathed books by and about Isaac Newton from Stott’s collection to the Grace Library at the University of Liverpool in 1944.
Walter Stott pre-deceased his wife, dying at the age of 71 in 1937.
Grandson
1892-1963
ToggleGranddaughter
1893-1962
Daughter
1862-1905
1862-1905
During her short life she displayed signs of outstanding scientific talent. She chose chemistry as her career and was the second woman to pass the London School of Pharmacy’s examination in 1888.
She became a lecturer and demonstrator at the London School of Medicine for Women. It is believed that she later became the first Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Free Hospital in London. She was the first female fellow of the Institute of Chemistry.
Lucy Boole was the first woman to formally undertake research in pharmaceutical chemistry. She acted as assistant to the chemist Wyndham Rowland Dunstan (1861-1924), Professor of Chemistry to the Pharmaceutical Society. Her method of analysis of tartar emetic was the official method of assay until 1963.
Lucy never married and lived with her mother at 16 Ladbroke Road in London, close to Notting Hill.
She became ill in 1897 and died in 1905 at the age of 43.
Daughter
1864-1960
Toggle1864-1960
Known as ‘Lily’, she spent her early years in London. Her mother was appointed Librarian at Queen's College, and was also a contributor to Crank, a progressive periodical. Lily was sent to live with the family of her uncle in Lancashire to improve her health. She later described him as 'a religious fanatic and sadist', who forced her to play the piano for hours. After two years she returned to London.
In 1879 she spent a summer in Cork with her grand-uncle, John Ryall, Professor of Greek and Vice President of Queen's College. This was the start of her interest in revolutionary struggles to improve the lot of the poorest in society. She discovered the works of Giuseppe Mazzini, and read about the Risorgimento in Italy.
From 1882-5 thanks to a small legacy she studied piano and composition at the Berlin Conservatory. On returning to London she was introduced to Sergei Kravchinsky (1852-1895) also known as Stepniak, revolutionary and writer. He and his wife taught Russian to Lily and her sister Lucy, as they had to Constance Garnett, the translator.
In 1887 Lily travelled to Russia to see for herself the plight of the Russian people. In St Petersburg she smuggled food into the prison, and met relatives of other prisoners, hearing their stories of repression and deprivation. A steamboat journey on the Volga kindled a lifelong interest in Slavonic folk song.
In 1889, back in London, she met Wilfrid Michael Voynich, a Polish political refugee, who eventually became her husband, and a rare book dealer. He is best known for the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval manuscript that he discovered in Italy, written in a language that has never been deciphered.
Her earliest publications, under the pen name E.L. Voynich were translations from the Russian. She was an exceptionally gifted linguist, quickly adding Ukranian and Polish to the languages she had mastered. To this day her translation of Chopin's letters from the Polish remains the standard edition.
The Voyniches moved to Soho where they had an antiquarian book business. Initially this was also a front for the dissemination of anti-Tsarist propaganda, but with the death of Stepniak in 1895, their revolutionary activity ceased.
E.L. Voynich's best known novel, The Gadfly was published in New York in 1897, and shortly afterwards in London. A gripping adventure story, set in the Risorgimento, pitting the ideals of youth against the corruption of the older generation, it has entertained and inspired generations of young people. In 1898 it was staged in London by George Bernard Shaw, and in 1955 in the USSR it was filmed with a score by Shostakovich that included the ever-popular Romance theme. The Gadfly was read by generations of teenagers in schools in the Soviet Union, and also enjoyed great success in Communist China.
E.L. Voynich worked with the Quakers in the East End of London from 1914-18, and was active as a composer in London until 1921 when she joined her husband in New York. In New York she taught and composed music. After Wilfrid's death in 1930, E.L. Voynich shared a New York apartment with their business associate Anne Nil, and her adopted daughter, Winifred Gaye. In 1955 a Soviet delegate to the UN discovered that she was still alive, and in financial straits. The Soviet Union paid her a generous sum in lieu of royalties, relieving her of financial worries. In 1957 her cantata The Submerged City was performed at the Bolshoi Theatre. She died on 27 July 1960 in New York.
Brother
1819-1888
1819-1888
A teaching colleague working with George in the earlier part of his career stated that William had great difficulty learning from his older brother, due to the latter’s impatience.
Nevertheless, at the age of 21 William was helping out by teaching certain classes along with his older sister Mary Ann at his brother George’s boarding school at Potter Gate, Lincoln. William persevered and made teaching his career.
William married twice during his lifetime. His first marriage was in 1846 to Eliza Pearson (1821-1851) by whom he had a son Walter John George Boole (1850-1899). This son married Mary Coats (1852-1932) and they produced five grandchildren.
In December 1864 William travelled from England to Cork with his younger brother Charles to bid farewell to his brother George who had died of pneumonia. Unfortunately they arrived too late to make their goodbyes.
In 1882, at the age of 63, William married Ann Lewis Trainor. He died in Lincoln six years later at the age of 69.
Brother
1821-1904
1821-1904
He first worked as a merchant in Liverpool and in 1844 married Ann Harding. But within two years, Ann was dead, due to a brain disease. Devastated, he moved back to the family in Lincolnshire.
By 1851 Charles was living in Sleaford, close to Lincoln and was again in business. He remarried a wine merchant’s daughter there called Millicent Nickolls in 1853 and together they had a large family of nine children, with two dying close to birth and a daughter dying aged seven years.
Charles’s career flourished and by 1865 he was running a large colliery at Rainsford in Lancashire. But while Charles’s skills as a mining manager were very effective, his niece Ethel, who lived for a time in Rainsford following her father’s death, recorded him as being highly impatient, beating his children and at times punishing her by locking her in her room.
Charles’s son George went on to study at King’s College London, qualified as a mining engineer and in turn took over the management of the Rainsford colliery.
Charles and his wife Millicent moved to London when he retired aged 59, later moving to Croydon, where their daughter Ellen ran a very successful school, while their other daughter Millicent, an artist and illustrator commuted to London daily.
Charles Boole died in March 1904 aged 82 and was buried in Croydon.
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