Friday, June 1, 2018

Charles Sanders Peirce - philosopher, logician, mathematician

For anyone who has studied formal logic, Peirce (pronounced like "purse"), is remembered for his binary operator, the Peirce arrow which, as it turns out, is functionally sufficient to derive all the other logical operators. This math fact gives us the ability to construct entire computers using only a single logic gate.

Charles Sanders Peirce (/pɜːrs/,[9] like "purse"; 10 September 1839 – 19 April 1914) was an American philosopherlogicianmathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.


Peirce's most important work in pure mathematics was in logical and foundational areas. He also worked on linear algebramatrices, various geometries, topology and Listing numbersBell numbersgraphs, the four-color problem, and the nature of continuity.
He worked on applied mathematics in economics, engineering, and map projections (such as the Peirce quincuncial projection), and was especially active in probability and statistics.[79]
Discoveries
Peirce made a number of striking discoveries in formal logic and foundational mathematics, nearly all of which came to be appreciated only long after he died:
In 1860[80] he suggested a cardinal arithmetic for infinite numbers, years before any work by Georg Cantor(who completed his dissertation in 1867) and without access to Bernard Bolzano's 1851 (posthumous) Paradoxien des Unendlichen.
The Peirce arrow,
symbol for "(neither) ... nor ...", also called the Quine dagger.
In 1880–1981[81] he showed how Boolean algebra could be done via a repeated sufficient single binary operation (logical NOR), anticipating Henry M. Sheffer by 33 years. (See also De Morgan's Laws.)






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

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