Charles Sanders Peirce: Neglected American Genius

If you are interested in mathematics, logic, linguistics, or astronomy, then you should get to know the life and work of Charles Sanders Peirce.

These books, from Dover Publications, are not only a great place to start, but there is more than enough substance here to develop a fine appreciation for Peirce's accomplishments.

For example:

Peirce's work on semiotics ("theory of signs") is key to linguistics.

He worked as an astronomer at Harvard, measuring the shape of the Milky Way.

He realized that Boolean algebra could be reduced to two operations, NAND and NOR. In addition, he recognized that Boolean operations could be performed with switches, anticipating the digital computer.

There are many more.

Patrick Jost

The Advent of the Algorithm

I really wanted to like this book, as well as another by the same author: A Tour of the Calculus.

The battered scan should convince you that I DID read this book…some parts several times…

David Berlinski clearly knows his mathematics, and his "formula" of explaining things through historical anecdotes, should work, but it doesn't.

The problem is that the anecdotes start, very quickly, to seem forced. You just *know* that they did not happen.

In addition, there are many other books-some reviewed here-that do a much better of of accomplishing what Berlinski set out to do.

Patrick Jost