Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician and philosopher, born in 1839 and sometimes known as the father of pragmatism. Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, he made major contributions to logic, including theories of relations and quantification, and he defined abductive reasoning while rigorously formulating mathematical induction and deductive reasoning. He is counted among the founders of statistics and of semiotics, the study of signs. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, the idea later used to produce digital computers.