George Boole’s walk on the logical side of chance

Despite my many trips to Ireland, I have never yet been to Cork. Therefore, I have never visited its university, formerly called Queen’s College. But surfing the web I came across a description of the Aula Maxima of Queen’s College. On the east-facing window of this hall there is the Boole Memorial Window, made up of ten glass panels in two rows of five panels each. Each panel represents a branch of knowledge. For instance, the second panel in the bottom row represents Mathematics, depicting Bacon, Napier and Newton, and the last panel in the top row represents Engineering and Architecture, in the figures of Archimedes and Phidias. The central panel in the bottom row represents Logic, and there are three figures: Aristotle and Euclid standing behind George Boole (1815-1864), seated at a desk, writing (Fig. 1). Born in Lincoln (Lincolnshire) in 1815, Boole was appointed professor of mathematics at Queen’s College Cork in 1849, thanks to his papers and his reputation. Being a self-educated man, with no university training, this was a huge achievement, to say the least.1 The Boole Memorial Window was built in 1866 in memory of Boole, the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College Cork.