He was a mathematical genius, a philosopher and, for many, the father of the information age, whose legacy surrounds us everywhere in the computers, electronic circuits and technology that support life in the 21st century.
But could the extraordinary mind of George Boole, who was University College Cork’s first mathematics professor, also have been the inspiration for one of literature’s most infamous evil geniuses, Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Professor James Moriarty?
That, at least, is the theory of his biographer Prof. Desmond MacHale, who argues there is certainly an ‘elementary’ link that has never before been observed between Moriarty and Boole.
On the face of it, the man and the fictional character couldn’t be more different.
Boole, a self-taught Englishman born in Lincoln in 1815, the son of a shoemaker and a lady’s maid, was appointed professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork, as it was known at the time, in 1849.
The brilliant thinker is credited with theories of algebraic logic and hailed as the father of modern computer science.
Moriarty, in contrast, is called by Holmes ‘the Napoleon of crime’.
Prof. MacHale, who is emeritus professor of mathematics in Cork, admits that the link between fact and fiction is a truly ‘tangled tale’, but there were many similarities as well as direct links between Sherlock Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Boole’s wife, which have led him to conclude that the evil genius Moriarty is based on the genius Boole.
Prof. McHale said: ‘Moriarty was a professor at a small provincial university. He was a mathematician. If you look at the mathematical papers that Moriarty wrote, they can be linked almost directly with half a dozen of the papers that George Boole wrote.’
‘Moriarty’s salary was almost the exact same as Boole’s salary here in Cork,’ he said. ‘It was £250 year.’
He will explore the connections further in a lecture on August 26, as part of Boole’s bicentenary celebrations at UCC next week.
As well as their shared interest in binomial theory and astronomy, MacHale believes that the initial illustrations of Moriarty by artist Sidney Paget for the Sherlock Holmes books are ‘almost exactly identical’ to photographs of Boole.
He said that the pictorial evidence was the ‘strongest bit’ of his theory: ‘Nobody fits as much as Boole does,’ he said. ‘His physical appearance, his occupation, his mathematical prowess – it really fits quite well.’
Prof. MacHale said that even the ‘sombre sounding’ name Moriarty was of great significance.
‘The name can be broken up to mori arte, which is the Latin for the art of death,’ he said.
Prof. MacHale said that Conan Doyle wanted to base his villain on a ‘very clever man’ like Boole, rather than a ‘low-life’ criminal.
The author’s aim was ‘to pervert’ a supposedly saintly figure.
‘Sherlock Holmes is a good guy and he was a great logician,’ Prof. MacHale observed. ‘But there was nobody on the bad side who was as clever as Holmes.’ Conan Doyle created Moriarty in order to provide him with an adversary of equal intellect who would test his powers to their fullest.
His wife, Mary Everest Boole, who was a niece of the famous surveyor George Everest, after whom the mountain was named, outlived George Boole by 50 years.
Prof. MacHale said he recently came across a line in Mrs Everest Boole’s writings that ‘absolutely startled’ him: ‘She said that everybody in his lifetime regarded George Boole as a saintly character.
But she also said “I have never seen anybody with such a vast potential for evil as my husband”.
Meanwhile, Prof. MacHale said that he is enjoying the BBC adaptation of Conan Doyle’s detective stories. He said: ‘I’m not a big Cumberbatch fan, but I have to hand it to him: he has this esoteric sort of look to him.’
Prof. MacHale is a contributor to The Genius Of George Boole, a documentary to be shown on RTÉ One at 10.35pm on Tuesday, September 1. It is narrated by actor Jeremy Irons.
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By Fionnuala O’Leary
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