Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist. He is known for being one of the founders of pragmatism, an influential philosophical tradition, and for his work in logic, where he developed a form of predicate logic that's been essential to the development of various fields, including computer science. He also contributed to the development of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols.

Proved the functional completeness of the NOR gate. Proposed the implementation of logic via electrical circuits, decades before Claude Shannon. Extended Aristotelian logic with first-order predicate calculus, independently of Gottlob Frege, a crucial precursor in computability theory. Also relevant to early work on artificial intelligence, logic programming.

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, writing in 1934, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote in 1959, "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".

• Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce made major contributions to logic, such as theories of relations and quantification.
• Peirce to symbolic logic are more numerous and varied than those of any other writer—at least in the nineteenth century." For Peirce, logic also encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science.
• He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics or study of signs, of which he is a founder, which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th-century Western philosophy.