Mary Everest Boole

Mary Everest Boole was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole. Her progressive ideas on education, as expounded in The Preparation of the Child for Science, included encouraging children to explore mathematics through playful activities such as curve stitching. Her life is of interest to feminists as an example of how women made careers in an academic system that did not welcome them.

She was born in England, the daughter of Reverend Thomas Roupell Everest, Rector of Wickwar, and Mary nee Ryall. Her uncle was George Everest, the surveyor and geographer after whom Mount Everest was named. She spent the first part of her life in France where she received an education in mathematics from a private tutor. On returning to England at the age of 11, she continued to pursue her interest in mathematics through self-instruction. Self-taught mathematician George Boole tutored her, and she visited him in Ireland where he held the position of professor of mathematics at Queen's College Cork. Upon the death of her father in 1855, they married and she moved to Cork. Mary greatly contributed as an editor to Boole's The Laws of Thought, a work on algebraic logic. She had five daughters by him.

She was widowed in 1864, at the age of 32, and returned to England, where she was offered a post as a librarian at Queen's College, London. She also tutored privately in mathematics and developed a philosophy of teaching that involved the use of natural materials and physical activities to encourage an imaginative conception of the subject. Her interest extended beyond mathematics to Darwinian theory, philosophy and psychology and she organised discussion groups on these subjects among others. At Queen's College, against the approval of the authorities, she organised discussion groups of students with the unconventional James Hinton, a promulgator of polygamy. This in part led to her mental breakdown and the dispersal of her children.

In later life, she belonged to the circle of the Tolstoyan pacifist publisher, C. W. Daniel; she chose the name The Crank for his magazine because, she said, 'a crank was a little thing that made revolutions'.

Mary took an active interest in politics, introducing her daughter Ethel to the Russian anti-tsarist cause under Sergei Stepniak. After the Boer war 1899-1902 she became more outspoken in her writings against imperialism, organised religion, the financial world and the tokenism she felt that Parliament represented. She opposed suffrage and probably for this reason has not generally been regarded as a feminist. She died in 1916, at the age of 84.