Mary Boole

by Dino Surendran

What are wives of mathematicians like? I suppose one should say spouses, but I refuse to do so, because husbands of mathematicians deserve a separate study! Certainly some wives are long-suffering women who only realise their quandary when their honeymoon is repeatedly broken by statements like "Yes! Wait a minute, I'll be right back..." only to find their husbands half an hour later sitting in front of a sheaf of blank and filled papers. That's hopefully an exaggeration, but I look forward to meeting Nada Wiles one day and getting her frank opinion on her husband's work on Fermat's Last Theorem.

Others are quite the opposite - I was told once about an Oz mathie who would would be talking with you in his office when suddenly a car horn could be heard and he would say to you "That's my wife!" before dashing down to meet her within the minute's grace that she permitted him to respond in. (Needless to say, she was American). Yet the vast majority of them are perfectly normal human beings, as are their husbands, and you would find no difference in their homes than in that of, say, a dentist or a teacher.

There are rare cases where wives of mathematicians are themselves mathematicians. The Australian algebraists Neumann and Neumann are possibly the best known examples, with Hanna being acknowledged as being better than John. A lesser known example is that of the Booles, who lived in England in the 19th century.

George Boole, as you may well know, was initially a teacher who did mathematics in his spare time. Or as others would say, was a mathematician who did teaching in his spare time to support his parents. He eventually became professor of maths at Queen's College in Cork. There he met and married the niece of a classics professor, Mary Everest.

Two things strike us at once. Firstly, she was seventeen years younger than him. One would not expect such a marriage to succeed in a mutually benefiting manner, but it did. The implication was that her mental processes were certainly on the same wavelength as her husband's. That sounds quite chauvinistic, but I am not comparing her to a male, but to a great mind.

Secondly, her uncle got a mountain named after him. This may seem a remarkable coincidence and it is in fact little more, except to tell us that steely determination ran in the family.

Mary's father was Reverend Thomas Roupell Everest while her mom was Mary Ryall. (Exercise for the reader: Work out who Mary was named after.) We may as well mention another triviality, that Ryall's brother was the Vice President of Queen's College.

The first decade of Mary's life were spent in France, where her father was recovering from an illness. One result was that Mary's first language was francais, pas anglais, although she also spoke the latter. What is of more interest to us is that her main inspiration in terms of education received was continental. For two hours each day she and her siblings would be relieved from the boredom of their mother's lessons (Mrs Everest was later described by Mary junior as intelligent but unintellectual) by one M. Deplace, who used a method of teaching far superior to anything used ('bothered with' may be a better phrase) in conservative England at the time.

This method, possibly based on Rousseau's teachings, had children led to new concepts by asking them a series of questions and then telling to write answers as soon as the question was asked. He would then have them analyse the questions and answers. In this way they would come to an understanding superior to what would have been the case had he told them anything directly. Their notebooks were filled with only their own writing; they were led to ask questions in other and all circumstances to get answers.

Mary's father was justifiably worried about Mary's brilliance. Worried about her being too good for a woman or worried that the world would suppress her? The latter probably, for he was of liberal mind. Cambridge, which inhaled and exhaled men of lower intelligence than her, was closed to women. Any mathematics she would learn from then on, i.e. after leaving France for the musty cupboards of England, would have to be learnt on her own. Which she did, inwardly thanking Deplace for giving her such a fine mode of thinking. She used her dad's books, and he laid no restrictions on her meeting the many brilliant friends of his, like Herschel and Charles Babbage. George Everest, her much-travelled uncle, was so impressed by her that he asked if he could adopt her. She loved her parents too much to agree though. If she had agreed it would not have been a unique situation --- I vaguely recall that Dirac, the Nobel Laureate physicist, adopted his nephew who became a fine mathematician.

She was 18 when she first met George Boole, and he became her tutor. Five years later, her husband. He continued to teach her maths (she attended his otherwise-males-only lectures) and she encouraged him with writing his book "Laws of thought". After his untimely death, she taught maths (to future governesses in the women's part of the college) albeit with the high sounding official title of "Librarian". However, she was forced to quit this job after she wrote the book, "The Message of Psychic Science for nurses and mothers".

Many things occupied her time. Teaching children maths for instance, where she followed Deplace's method with her own additions. In particular, she believed that children should be given mathematical objects to play with and thus develop, at their own pace, ideas of order and pattern. For instance, she invented curve stitching cards. She was fascinated by the psychology of learning maths - she felt it was absorbed not just through the mind, but through the entire body. (I am tempted to say like a frog's breathing but that analogy has too many unrelated and unwanted connotations.)

This is a good place to mention that Mary was not at all in favour of competitiveness in the early stages of learning. In her own words "The stimulus of competition, when applied at an early age to real thought processes, is injurious both to nerve-power and to scientific insight" and Only dead mathematics can be taught where the attitude of competition prevails: living mathematics must always be a communal possession."

Communication was another of her strong points. She organised popular "Sunday Night Conversations" where students and her discussed philsophy (eastern and western), hebrew, animal rights, logic, evolution, psychology, etc. She felt these sessions were to amuse and not to teach, which is something we'd be better off remembering today.

She put many of her thoughts onto paper, though most of her books were only published posthumously. Some were considered (at the time - which was Victorian) contreversial, others were considered too unscientific with her emphasis on psychology. But few listened to her ideas - perhaps she should have taken a page from the Brontes and used a male pseudonym! But even if she had done that, I am not sure if Victorian ears were ready for such methods, which although very rewarding, required much effort to be put in by the teacher.

References

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