Who Am I?

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Pretend you are on one of those Guess-My-Line-style gameshows. Could you name the following person?

"I have been referred to as inarguably 'the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced... because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating.' I was accomplished as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor, psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, book reviewer, dramtist, actor, short story writer, phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician, and metaphysician. I developed a cardinal arithmetic for infinite numbers years before Cantor, axiomatized natural number arithmetic before Dedekind and Peano, and set out axiomatized set theory before Zermelo. Fifty years before Shannon, I described how Boolean logic could be implemented in electrical switches.

"Karl Popper described me as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Noam Chomsky described his linguistic work as 'almost paraphrasing' my own. Other big fans of my work include Walker Percy, W. V. O. Quine, Jürgen Habermas, and Umberto Eco."

"Who am I?"

Comments

  1. Andy9:08 PM

    Frank Lloyd Wright?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12:41 AM

    Charles Sanders Peirce. Chomsky talks about him in Language and Mind.

    ReplyDelete

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