My selection for the meme team

I've been tagged by Zeno at Halfway There, with the following blog meme:

The rules are as follows:
1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 5 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag 5 more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

I don't usually buy into this stuff, but why not? So my selection is ...

Charles S. Peirce (1839 — 1914)

I've chosen him even though I don't really believe in the idea of a "favorite historical figure". But he is really interesting. Peirce was an American philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and humanist. He has been extremely influential, yet he remains somewhat obscure.

1. Peirce's name is pronounced "purse". (The family name was originally spelled Pers.)

2. My choice of Peirce was entirely pragmatic.

3. Peirce invented a conformal map projection: the quincuncial projection.
It also turns out the map tessellates the plane, i.e. you can seamlessly tile the plane with rotated copies of the map. (Tessellation is also sometimes used in quilting.)

4. Peirce was one of the founders of the field of semiotics, which is about signs and their interpretation. On that theme (ok, it's a bit indirect), here's a video about signs:



5. Peirce developed a graphical system for representing logic called existential graphs. In 1984, John F. Sowa built on Peirce's ideas and ideas from semantic networks in artificial intelligence to develop conceptual graphs.

The meme made me do it

So now I'm supposed to tag some more folks with this meme. I nonbindingly-respectfully-whattheheckfully tag:

Ray Deonandan at Deonandia
Dr. Free-Ride at Adventures in Ethics and Science
Antonella Pavese at antonellapavese.com
Dr. B at Bitch Ph.D.
Jim Bobby at Jim Bobby Sez