George Boole (2 November 1815 8 December 1864)

was an English mathematician, philosopher and logician. His work was in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and he is now best known as the author of The Laws of Thought. As the inventor of the prototype of what is now called Boolean logic, which became the basis of the modern digital computer, Boole is regarded in hindsight as a founder of the field of computer science. Boole said, no general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities ca n be established which does not explicitly recognise ... those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning Two systematic treatises on mathematical subjects were completed by Boole during his lifetime. The Treatise on Differential Equations appeared in 1859, and was followed, the next year, by a Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences, a sequel to the former work. In the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of the Differential Equations is an account of the general symbolic method, and of a general method in analysis, originally described in his memoir printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1844. During the last few years of his life Boole worked on a second edition of his Differential Equations, and part of his last vacation was spent in the libraries of the Royal Society and the British Museum; but it was left incomplete. Isaac Todhunter printed the manuscripts in 1865, in a supplementary volume

Analysis:
In 1857, Boole published the treatise On the Comparison of Transcendents, with Certain Applications to the Theory of Definite Integrals, in which he studied the sum of residues of a rational function. Among other results, he proved what is now called Boole's identity:

for any real numbers ak > 0, bk, and t > 0.Generalisations of this identity play an important role in the theory of the Hilbert transform.