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. A prodigy with a penchant for self-education, Boole was a teenage schoolteacher who rose to become the first professor of mathematics at what is now University College Cork, in 1849. Along the way he penned two seminal books: The Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847 and later, in 1854, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. While his...