George Boole Petition

As of this evening, close to 700 people have put their names to a petition to show support for the urgent repair and/or restoration of George Boole's house at Number 5, Grenville Place, Cork.

As first reported by the Communicate Science blog, the building suffered significant structural damage last month when the roof and a number of floors began to give way. Engineers and contractors have since examined the building and have removed the roof and and number of floors from part of the house. For pictures of this work, see here.

Barry O'Sullivan of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre and the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork (where Boole worked) set up the petition which describes the house as being of "enormous importance to the legacy of George Boole and UCC, Cork and Ireland's connection with him".

As of 5pm today, the petition had been signed by 698 people, many of them academics with interests in computing, mathematics and science but many also outside of academia. A quick glance at the petition shows that those interested in supporting this cause include people from as far away as Florida, Vienna, Harvard University in the US and Uppsala University in Sweden, to name just a few.

While the details of saving, restoring and refurbishing the building (which is in private ownership) are complicated, it is great to see such support being shown for a worthy cause.

You can view and sign the petition here.