THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2023
“Yet, Mother, amid those trials, you showed your strength, you acted boldly: you trusted in God and responded to concern with tender care, to fear with love, to anguish with acceptance.”Pope Francis
George Boole was born in Lincolnshire, England. He was a precocious learner, poring over mathematics journals and Newton’s Principia. A tutor taught him Latin, and then he taught himself Greek, becoming so well versed that at 14, he published a translation of a poem by Meleager. The work was so good that a local schoolmaster declared it a fake, claiming a young person never could have done such fine work. By the time he was 19, he’d founded his own school. He later married Mary Everest, the niece of Sir George Everest, for whom the mountain is named.
Boole’s legacy lives on not only in everyday mathematics but also on the moon: the Boole crater is named for him. The keyword Bool is also a Boolean data type in programming languages, and there’s even a road called Boole Heights in Bracknell, Berkshire.
When George Boole embarked on the writing of his book An investigation into the Laws of Thought, on Which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (1854), he wrote to a friend: “I am now about to set seriously to work upon preparing for the press an account of my theory of Logic and Probabilities which in its present state I look upon as the most valuable if not the only valuable contribution that I have made or am likely to make to Science and the thing by which I would desire if at all to be remembered hereafter.”
George didn’t need college to make his discoveries. He learned from his father. Or, was home schooled.
Peace
by C.K. Williams
We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
even knows now what about,
what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws like fishbones,
the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, through bed, and through the night,
feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touching, back to back,
the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep us lifting, turning,
through the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain, the aching dark, the weary dark,
then, toward dawn, I can’t help it, though justice won’t I know be served, I pull her to me,
and with such accurate, graceful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive embracing our entire lengths.
“Peace” by C.K. Williams from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 