George Boole, the mathematician who was born 200 years ago this week (2 Nov, 1815) in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England, was the son of a shoemaker, left school at the age of sixteen, never attended a university but would become the architect of what we call the digital age today. The first professor of mathematics at the new Queen’s College, in Cork, Ireland, wrote his 1854 magnum opus, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, while living in the city.