A boarding house run by a lady called Mrs. Knowles at Strawberry Hill, in the Sunday’s Well area of Cork city, was Boole’s first place of residence in Ireland. He remained there until his later move to 5 Grenville Place, overlooking the northern channel of the River Lee. He shared lodgings at that second address with Raymond de Vericour, Professor of Modern Languages at Queen’s College and an old friend from Boole’s Lincoln days.
Boole soon settled into academic life, enjoying a degree of financial independence and a new sense of freedom. By March of the following year he wrote to his friend and lifelong correspondent William Thomson, who was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow:
"I can say with perfect truth that I feel a daily increasing delight in my new duties."
On 30 May 1851 Boole was elected Dean of the Science Division of the Faculty of Arts. He took this new position very seriously and was most conscientious in his duties. It was his task to address the faculty at the commencement of the 1851-52 session. His address, entitled The Claims of Science, especially as Founded in its Relations to Human Nature was later published at Boole’s own expense. As Dean, Boole also had to attend meetings of Council, which were often very time-consuming. But Boole was generally considered by his contemporaries to be a patient and excellent committee member. He strongly believed in the process of small groups of people carefully studying relevant facts and reaching democratic decisions. He was re-elected Dean for the following session.
Another important event happened in Boole’s life in 1851. The University of Dublin (TCD) was the first university to formally recognise his academic strengths when it awarded him an honorary LLD that year. He used this title in his second book An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, published in 1854. It is believed that the suggestion to grant this honour came from his friend Reverend Charles Graves, then Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin. He was an ancestor of the poet and novelist Robert Graves (1895-1985).
The Cuvierian Society for the Cultivation of the Sciences was founded in Cork in 1835. It followed the slow demise of the Royal Cork Institution (RCI), an organisation modelled on the Royal Institution of London, which had provided public education in the sciences in Cork city since 1807. The Cuvierian Society, the remit of which extended beyond the sciences to antiquities and the fine arts, was named after the French naturalist, zoologist and geologist Baron Cuvier (1769-1832). On 6 November 1850 George Boole was elected to full membership of the Society. The first paper he delivered was based on his short biography of Cork native John Walsh, a highly eccentric mathematician and notorious crank who had died a few years previously. This sensitive and at times humorous document impressed the members of the Cuvierian Society very deeply, and Boole was elected to Council on 19 September 1851 and to the Sectional Committee on Statistics and Political Economy the same year. He also became a member of the Dublin Statistical Society. The following year he became a Vice-President of the Society. Further learned papers were delivered by Boole in succeeding years and on 24 May 1854 he was elected President of the Cuvierian Society.
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