Though born into a lower-class family, I improved upon my common school education by teaching myself both Greek and Latin.

Working as an elementary teacher, I felt the need to learn more mathematics...and began reading the works of Laplace and Lagrange.

I wrote a book on logic, being one of the first authors to argue that logic should be associated with mathematics, not metaphysics.

In another one of my books, I pushed the idea that mathematics was more than numerical magnitude...that it could be the formal manipulation of symbols as well.

My "opus" was a text that established formal logic as a system of algebra.