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Sure, this wasn't meant as a judgement. Logic straddles mathematics and philosophy (and CS), and being considered the founder of an important philosophical school is arguably one of the biggest achievements possible for a scholar, so that's where I'd put the emphasis. The more important point was how bizarre it is to single him out on the landing page for 'Mathematics'.



Fair enough. I'm a bit of a Peirce fanboy, so there's that. Contemporary Philosophy has more or less utterly abandoned Peirce's chief aims, which were to achieve clarity and distinctness for our conceptions of things. So much so that I'd consider calling someone a philosopher to be at best a back-handed compliment. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware there are philosophers working today who hope for more than the approbation of their fellows, but they're rare and they're not who most people think of when they hear the word.

Peirce is probably the greatest American-born logician to live, and probably deserves to be on the short list of great American-born scientists (broadly construed in the 19th century and earlier sense) like Franklin and Gibbs, but yeah I agree that he's an odd choice for the first name on a mathematics landing page.

Maybe one day I'll write a graphical Prolog dialect based on his existential graphs[1].

[1] http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm




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