Augustus De Morgan (27 June 1806 – 18 March 1871) was a British mathematician and logician. He is best known for De Morgan's laws relating logical conjunction, disjunction, and negation, and for coining the term "mathematical induction", the underlying principles of which he formalized. De Morgan's contributions to logic are heavily used in many branches of mathematics, including set theory and probability theory, as well as other related fields such as computer science.
Childhood
Augustus De Morgan was born in Madurai, in the Carnatic region of India, in 1806. His father was Lieutenant-Colonel John De Morgan (1772–1816), who held various appointments in the service of the East India Company, and his mother, Elizabeth (née Dodson, 1776–1856), was the granddaughter of James Dodson, who computed a table of anti-logarithms (inverse logarithms). Augustus De Morgan became blind in one eye within a few months of his birth. His family moved to England when Augustus was seven months old. As his father and grandfather had both been born in India, De Morgan used to say that he was neither English nor Scottish nor Irish, but a Briton "unattached," using the technical term applied to an undergraduate of Oxford or Cambridge who was not a member of any one of the colleges.
When De Morgan was ten years old, his father died. His mathematical talents went unnoticed until he was fourteen when a family friend discovered him making an elaborate drawing of a figure from one of Euclid's works with a ruler and compasses. He received his secondary education from Mr. Parsons, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who preferred classics to mathematics.
