Yesterday morning I am listening to music on the radio when the programme's host announces that the next recording is the work of Shostakovich. Not my favourite composer, so I have the remote control ready to switch stations if necessary, but the introduction has my attention.
The music is from the soundtrack of a Russian film called "The Gadfly" which is based on a novel by one Ethel Lilian Voynich. Strange name, I'm thinking - and haven't I heard that surname before?
I learn that Ethel was born in Cork, the daughter of a philosopher and mathematician named George Boole who developed a system known as Boolean logic. I'd heard that expression before, without having a clue what it was about, and I was left wondering about the surname and its connection to Ireland. Later I found out that George was English, born in Lincoln, and appointed Professor of Mathematics at Queen's University, Cork, in 1849. So Ethel's Irishness was of birth, not of ancestry.
Ethel took an interest in Russian politics and became an associated with the Narodnik movement. She met Michael Voynich through the movement and they set up home together in 1895, and she became Ethel Voynich. "The Gadfly" was published in 1897. It became very popular in Soviet Russia, though she only learned of this much later in a conversation with a Russian diplomat. She was then able to collect the royalties on the Russian edition.
Now, Michael Voynich; he was actually Polish not Russian, real name Michał Wojnicz. After settling in Britain he gave up revolutionary politics and became a bookseller. He was naturalised and adopted the forename Wilfrid. Bookseller - when I learned this I remembered where I'd heard the name, on a TV programme about a mysterious text called the Voynich Manuscript.
The manuscript, Ethel, George Boole, and Mary Everest, Ethel's mother, are all subjects of articles in Wikipedia. Boolean Algebra has its own article.

Shostakovich's "Gadfly" music wasn't so bad after all.