cobbler’s son

A marginalia I forgot to mention in my review of Bill Bryson’s “Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society“ is that I discovered therein that George Boole FRS was the son of a cobbler. George Boole’s story and fundamental contributions to logic and probability theory is covered in Ian Stewart’s chapter, who is lauding him as a founder of theoretical computer science and of abstract algebra (along with the slightly older Evariste Galois). Anyway, I appreciated the tiny and completely irrelevant connection with Boole, in that my father also was a cobbler!