Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist born in 1839. He is considered the founder of pragmatism and developed a theory of signs known as semeiotics. Peirce made contributions in many fields including logic, mathematics, astronomy, physics and philosophy. He saw logic as a branch of semiotics and anticipated how electrical circuits could be used for computation. Peirce graduated from Harvard and published several influential works, leaving behind a vast body of writing when he died in 1914.