New book suggests Arthur Conan Doyle based Moriarty on George Boole | Hacker News Reader

New book suggests Arthur Conan Doyle based Moriarty on George Boole

irishtimes.com

61 pointspaulette44921 comments

Based on what is in the article I wouldn't call this a very strong thesis.

"[...] numerous persuasive similarities. Both characters held chairs at small provincial universities; both won appointments on the basis of outstanding early work; both had interests in astronomy; the two were of similar appearance"

These coincidences are supposed to be persuasive? I know several people like that. Plus the photograph and the illustration are nothing alike!

"[...] Boole was a man of high morals and excellent character, a social reformer, religious thinker and family man. The new book by MacHale and Cohen presents extensive arguments that may account for the dramatic contrast between the two characters."

I haven't read the book but that's some damning praise. The arguments are not persuasive, but at least they're long!

Come come, surely it must be the case that either Moriarty was based on George Boole or he wasn't. Tertium non datur!

Plus what about that one paragraph where Doyle went to school with two actual Moriarty-s who were also gifted mathematicians?? Let's hear more about those guys.

Doyle's inspiration for his stories was always based in his own experiences and people he knew. Hound of the Baskervilles was written after Doyle visited Devonshire. He admitted in his later years that the most glaring mistakes were when he wrote about places or occupations which he had no real history with - for example his geography in describing the United States is wildly incorrect (forgivable in the sense that at the time, the US was a backwater nation and England was the center of Western civilization) or in Silver Blaze, where he learned later that some key plot points were not accurate because he knew so little of horse husbandry.

It's really not much of a reach to assume that he based his most notable characters on people he was very familiar with in his own life. The character of Watson is clearly based on himself, reacting to the genius of Homes and even Moriarty.

MacHale is _the_ expert on Boole, and a wonderful man. Without reading the book though, I do suspect motivated reasoning on his part.

Has anyone ever thought that he based Watson’s final opinion of Holmes as “the best, and wisest man I have ever known” on the words of Plato about Socrates?

Plato: “the wisest, and justest, and best of all men whom I have ever known” (Phaedo).

I love finding these little connections (like a detective) while reading or listening to classics.

Like for example anyone play piano here? Earlier this year I finally heard the Beethoven Emperor Concerto and realized that Schumann’s “Carnaval” the whole theme of David is taken from that concerto!

Talk about imitation :)

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

I'm sure Boole approved of that.

Fascinating how these two contemporaries achieved immortal fame through completely different disciplines.

I wonder if in 100+ years people will rememeber prominent writers or scientists of this age?

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

is that the actual quote? Maybe not enough coffee on my part but i am having difficulty with it.

By eliminating impossible, which strikes me a fairly redundant thing to do, we are left with probable and improbable?

Your post could have been written by:

- Kurtz79 (probable)

- Marlow79 using your login for REASONS (possible but improbable)

- Elon Musk using your login for REASONS(possible but improbable)

- Stephen Hawking (impossible)

- Queen Victoria (impossible)

etc ...

do we really need to eliminate all the impossible? i'm not sure it really moves us along finding the OP, even if we do.

That's a very good point, however eliminating the impossible (or just improbable) is a necessary first step towards finding "the truth".

Then all you need is a good prior, to allow you to tell the truth from the nontruth. And the er, simplest prior is the Occamist prior- that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true.

Going by which, Kurtz79 is the most likely author of the post above, since that's the simplest explanation that is not impossible (or improbable).

Edit: it's "simplest" in the sense it doesn't require REASONS.

At least the giants, like Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins.

I believe this to be a reference to a quote from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Never heard of those and I do read a lot so they hardly qualify as giants even though they have had their share of success. Stephen King, on the other hand, is probably not going to be forgotten any time soon (I find his books dull tbh but nobody cares about my opinion :).

Posterity does not work like that. Many authors who were popular disappeared completely from memory, while other who were relatively unknown became extremely popular decades after their death.

Academics play a major role in what we remember about more than 100 years ago, much more than actual success when the book was published. Octave Mirbeau was much much more popular than Marcel Proust when they were both active, but you probably know much more about the latter.

Who the hell are they?

Honestly, Conan Doyle is a Victorian Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum, rather than any high-falutin literary author. That's a big part of why he is still remembered.

Some of you may like this interview with Arthur Conan Doyle, he explains why he created the Sherlock Holmes novels

Rough summary: previously the detective genre had detectives ultimately point out the perpetrator without actually explaining to the reader how and why they came to this conclusion, i.e. the detectives and perpetrators were simple roles in a story, and the story never actually described the process of investigation, which the Sherlock Holmes novels did, irrespective of whether they were realistic or not... Then he starts ranting about spirituality and ghosts and other quackery, like his own "experiences", ... I guess fantasy has its positives and negatives

https://youtu.be/rZFdH76H1lA

>> Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story appeared in 1887. Holmes’ remarkable conclusions were based on data, logic, statistics, probability, deduction and proof.

Actually, they were based on logical abduction. Not deduction.

Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,[1] abductive inference,[1] or retroduction[2]) is a form of logical inference which starts with an observation or set of observations then seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abduction_(logic)

to be entirely fair, it's not how we teach math and logic to students and readers, but all our axioms (which we still can't verify) are the result of abductive reasoning. Sometimes we discovered that a specific abductive reasoning was superfluous and could be derived from other axioms, turning the ex-axiom into a theorem. So the current axiomatic systems and their applications seem entirely deductive usages, but the axioms are in fact still of an abductive nature... this is much more visible in domains like physics, where the teeth of time has not yet gnawed as thoroughly as in the foundations of mathematics...

Edit: just adding: Some day physics might appear like an entirely deductive system (apart from a very small set of axioms or postulates), and hard to discern from the field of mathematics

I always though that his death was bit cruel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole#Death

Died at a young age due to old a lack of medical understanding.

I'm also from Cork and the phrase "What ails you cures you" is still used but normally in the context of a hangover and the suggestion being to go get the hair of the dog.

I wonder what current medical/scientific beliefs will seem as far fetched in the year 2172.

... and Boole is the great great grandfather of Geoff Hinton (back propagation, etc.). The plot thickens!

I'm sure Arthur Conan Doyle drew from a number of influences to create Moriarty. Adam Worth and Jonathan Wild are considered inspirations for the character, for example:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/review-of-the-na...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Worth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Moriarty

There isn't much to the character in the Doyle stories, and he serves more as a plot device than a well developed character. So I kinda think people are trying to hard to find a RL souce for the character. Most of the brief treatment Doyle gives the character can be explained as plot driven.

He's super-intelligent and evil because he needs to be a worthy enough opponent to kill of Holmes. He's a Prof at a small University because he needs a job that both proves his intelligence and is prestigious, but gives him enough time to run a criminal empire. He runs his criminal enterprise via a web of intermediaries because if he was directly involved Holmes could just report him to the cops instead of needing a complicated plan to roll up his criminal network. The specific references to his scientific work might be inspired by some specific scientists, but it seems at least as likely they just sounded to Doyle like the kinda thing a 19th century mathematical genius would get up to.

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