3 Pottergate, Lincoln

Image: © Jo and Steve Turner Taken: 19 Jan 2013

Grade II* Listed house. With fragments of medieval building on ground floor at the rear of the north range it is mainly 17th century. It was remodelled in the early 18th century with late 18th and 19th century alterations it was later split into two houses (3 and 3a). A garage was added to 3 in 1931. George Boole, a Lincoln man and outstanding mathematician, invented “Boolean Logic” which is the binary system at the heart of silicon chips and all things digital. Boole established a boarding school here in 1840 which is also where his home is said to have been. It was at this school that Boole conducted his last teaching in Lincoln and where he won the Gold Medal from the Royal Society, in 1844. Late 1849 he was appointed the first Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College Cork and Rev. John Jackson Swift MA, curate of St Peter at Arches and formerly of Trinity College Dublin, continued the school here until the 1870s. In 1964 a plaque was unveiled on this building by Boole’s grandson Sir Geoffrey Taylor, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in Boole's memory.

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