The need to support his family meant that George Boole (1815 64) was a largely self-educated mathematician. Widely recognised for his ability, he became the first professor of mathematics at Cork. Boole belonged to the British school of algebra, which held what now seems to modern mathematicians to be an excessive belief in the power of symbolism. However, in Boole's hands symbolic algebra became a source of novel and lasting mathematics. Also reissued in this series, his masterpiece was An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), and his two later works A Treatise on Differential...