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…