Charles Sanders Peirce

Born September 10, 1839, Peirce trained as a chemist and worked as a scientist for three decades while reshaping logic from the margins. He made more contributions to symbolic logic than any other 19th-century writer, defined abductive reasoning, rigorously formalized induction and deduction, and co-founded statistics. As early as 1886, he saw that electrical switching circuits could perform logical operations - the insight that would later produce digital computers. He also founded semiotics, the formal study of signs, and developed a tripartite theory of predication that anticipated debates in 20th-century philosophy of language. In metaphysics he called himself an objective idealist, a scholastic realist about universals, and held that continuity and chance were real features of the universe - views he named synechism and tychism. He died April 19, 1914, having given pragmatism its name and logic its modern form.