George Boole

Boole was born 2 November 1815, received only a primary school education, and picked up Latin and modern languages on his own. At 16 he began teaching to support his family; by 19 he'd opened his own school, later running a boarding school in Lincoln. In 1849 he was appointed the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork, where he met his future wife, Mary Everest. He published around 50 articles and several treatises, including work on differential equations and early invariant theory, but his 1847 development of Boolean algebra - formalized in "The Laws of Thought" (1854) - became the foundation for binary logic and digital circuit design. The Royal Society awarded him its first gold prize for mathematics. On 8 December 1864, Boole died of pleural effusion after pneumonia, decades before Claude Shannon and Victor Shestakov used his algebra to build the first electronic computers.