How a Victorian mathematics don became a digital pioneer

"With a steely glare, a starched collar and a pair of truly prodigious sideburns, he is the digital pioneer you have almost certainly never heard of. Now, 200 years after his birth, George Boole is finally to get the acclaim he deserves." So begins a recent article in The Guardian. Well of course, if you're a computer scientist, you almost certainly have heard of George Boole; he after all was the creator of Boolean logic. However, that's probably all you know so there will be much about him that you're not aware of. As with Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and of course Alan Turing it's good to see these formerly obscure digital pioneers getting the public recognition they so deserve. Perhaps as our society becomes more and more dependent on computers we're starting to realise that these people are every bit as important as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Faraday,...