Charles Sanders Peirce

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Born: 10 Sept 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Died: 19 April 1914 in Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

Charles S Peirce was the son of Benjamin Peirce and studied at Harvard and worked for many years on the Coast and Geodetic Survey. He worked on geodesy but became interested in conformal map projections where he invented a quincuncial map projection using elliptic functions.

He was also interested in the Four Colour Problem and problems of knots and linkages studied by Kempe. He then extended his father's work on associative algebras and worked on mathematical logic and set theory. Except for courses on logic he gave at Johns Hopkins University, between 1879 and 1884, he never held an academic post.

T S Fiske, writing about the New York Mathematical Society (before it became the American Mathematical Society) in [23], describes Charles Peirce:-

Conspicuous among those who in the early nineties attended the monthly meetings ... was the famous logician, Charles S Peirce. His dramatic manner, his reckless disregard of accuracy in what he termed 'unimportant details', his clever newspaper articles describing the meetings of our young Society interested and amused us all. ... He was always hard up, living partly on what he could borrow from friends, and partly on what he got from odd jobs such as writing book reviews ... He was equally brilliant, whether under the influence of liquor or otherwise, and his company was prized by the various organisations to which he belonged; and he was never dropped from any of them even though he was unable to pay his dues. He infuriated Charlotte Angas Scott by contributing to the New York Evening Post an unsigned obituary of Arthur Cayley in which he stated upon no grounds, except that Cayley's father had for a time resided in Russia, that Cayley had inherited his genius from a Russian whom his father had married in St Petersburg. Shortly afterwards Miss Scott contributed to the Bulletin a more factual, sober article upon Cayley's life and work...