building society in 1847. He associated also with the Chartist Thomas Cooper, whose wife was a relation. From 1838 onwards, Boole was making contacts with sympathetic British academic mathematicians and reading more widely. He studied algebra in the form of symbolic methods, as far as these were understood at the time, and began to publish research papers. Professorship and life in Cork Boole's status as a mathematician was recognised by his appointment in 1849 as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork (now University College Cork (UCC)) in Ireland. He met his future wife, Mary Everest, there in 1850 while she was visiting her uncle John Ryall who was professor of Greek. They married some years later in 1855. He maintained his ties with Lincoln, working there with E. R. Larken in a campaign to reduce prostitution. Honours and awards In 1844, Boole's paper "On a General Method in Analysis" won the first gold prize for mathematics awarded by the Royal Society. He was awarded the Keith Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1857. He received honorary degrees of LL.D. from the University of Dublin and the University of Oxford. Works Boole's first published paper was "Researches in the theory of analytical transformations, with a special application to the reduction of the general equation of the second order", printed in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal in February 1840 (Volume 2, No. 8, pp. 64–73), and it led to a friendship between Boole and Duncan Farquharson Gregory, the editor of the journal. His works are in about 50 articles and a few separate publications. In 1841, Boole published an influential paper in early invariant theory. He received a medal from the Royal Society for his memoir of 1844, "On a General Method in Analysis". It was a contribution to the theory of linear differential equations, moving from the case of constant coefficients on which he had already published, to variable coefficients. The innovation in operational methods is to admit that operations may not commute. In 1847, Boole published The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, the first of his works on symbolic logic. Differential equations Boole completed two systematic treatises on mathematical subjects 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