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My encyclopedia says Boole was professor of math at University in Cork, Ireland.
The web notes: As it turns out, his life story is a good example of what can happen when you combine some intelligence with a lot of hard work. I find it inspiring and hope you will also. The story is much better told in a book than in anything I can find on the web. Brief exerpts here (ellipses omitted) from Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell (1937) do not really do it justice.
.....He was born in 1815 and was the son of a petty shopkeeper [,which] at that time was to be damned by foreordination. The whole class to which Boole's father belonged was treated with a contempt a trifle more contemptuous than that reserved for enslaved scullery maids and despised second footmen. A child in Boole's station should so live as never to transgress the strict limits of obedience imposed by that remarkable testimonial to human conceit and class-conscious snobbery.
.....To say that Boole's early struggles to educate himself into a station above that to which 'it had pleased God to call him' were a fair imitation of purgatory is putting it mildly. Making a pathetically mistaken diagnosis of the abilities which enabled the propertied class to goven those beneath them, Boole decided [at age 8] that he must learn Latin and Greek if he was ever to get his feet out of the mire. By the age of twelve he had mastered enough Latin (he had also taught himself Greek) to translate an ode of Horace into English verse. This precipitated a scholarly row. A classical master denied that a boy of twelve could have produced such a translation. Boole was humiliated and resolved to supply the defciencies of his self-instruction.
.....By the age of sixteen he saw that he must contribute at once to the support of his wretched parents [and took a job as an assistant teacher for four years. After that time] he had acquired a mastery of French, German, and Italian, [and] in his twentieth year Boole opened up a civilized school of his own.
.....To prepare his pupils properly he had to teach them some mathematics. His interest was aroused. It must be remembered that he had had no mathematical training beyond the rudiments. To get some idea of his mental capacity we can imagine the lonely student of twenty mastering, by his own unaided efforts, the Méchanique céleste of Laplace, one of the toughest masterpieces ever written for a conscientious student to assimilate, full of gaps and enigmatical declarations that 'it is easy to see'. Yet Boole, self-taught, found his way and saw what he was doing.
.....[For 14 years] Boole went on with the drudgery of elementary teaching, without a complaint, because his parents were now wholly dependent on his support. [He did his mathematical work solely 'on the side'.]
.....At last he got an opportunity. He was appointed Profeessor of Mathematics at the recently opened Queen's College at Cork, Ireland [at the age of 34. Fifteen years later he was dead.]
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