Visiting the grave of George Boole in Cork Ireland

George Boole is a pretty important person to me, and probably for you even if you do not know it. I spent more than 2 years struggling with his boolean algebra while I studied formal logic in my undergraduate degree. When I say struggling I mean struggling, supplementary exams and all.

Visiting his grave in Cork was rather spooky, I was not sure really why I wanted to go other than a basic tourist scenario of getting a picture of me next to it, so I could cross it off my tourist list. Chatting to a friend I realised it is for inspiration, as I get ready to hopefully write a dissertation later this year.

The next issue I was pondering was what do you do when you visit a grave? I have never visited a grave before, the only idea that came to my head was flowers. This was a bad idea as George is a guy and been dead for so long, flowers are way to person. While I was there I realised the ideal thing would be to burn some incense, it is pretty spiritual and I would feel mischievous lighting up some josh sticks in a formal Christian cemetery.

To get to the graveyard I walked out from the city centre, it is about a 40 minute walk and nice enough. You take the Blackrock road out through Ballingtemple until you get to the topaz petrol station and turn right into Church Road. A little bit up that road you will find St Michael's Church. The main gate was looked, so I got in via the little house on the side that has an interconnecting gate.

His grave is just another in the cemetery, it took me a while to go through them all to find his. It is very humble with just his name and the date he died. Not even an epitaph or a plaque added later to commemorate his achievements of his work. Apparently there is a commemorative plaque inside the church, but as the church was locked I did not see it.

My idea of showing my respects by placing a stone on his gravestone seemed like it was going to fail as the gravestone had a pitched top to it. I found (stole from the grave next door) 8 small stones that where relatively flat and managed to balance them on one side of the tombstones top. 8 stones, each representing 1 bit and together 1 byte, I am sure George would appreciate the thought. Next time I will make a card with a Venn diagram and a couple of incense sticks.

From there I soulfully walked back down towards Blackrock and had a coffee from the amazing Natural Food Bakery (George I am sure liked coffee). Then caught the number 2 bus back to the city, which you could of course use to get out there in the first place if you did not want to walk. The number 2 bus actually passes the church, still worth stopping by the bakery though, trust me.

The boolean logic that he invited and published in 1854, was not particularly useful at that time. It was not until 1937, when Claude Shannon wrote his thesis at MIT on how boolean logic could be used in electronics.

Electronics went on to become computers and in a similar way programming languages also use boolean values. So Georges work seemed pretty insignificant at the time, then sat around for 70 years before someone else found a use for it. I find that really inspiring and amazing.

This blog is as hard to write as I imagined and I have given up trying to explain exactly what George invented. Check out Wikipedia for a good over view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole

For someone who has such an impact on the world his goes every uncelebrated in Cork. To put this in perspective every piece of computer code has a variable refereed to as boolean in it.

A house that where he lived, in the city centre of years has a plaque, that is barely noticeable due to an overgrown tree and the house is in a terrible state of repair. Hardly a national treasure and not mentioned on any of the working tours I have done.