Charles Sanders Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a mathematician and professor of mathematics at Harvard. Peirce went to Harvard and graduated at the bottom of his class. In 1870 he formed a discussion group, called the 'Metaphysical Club,' in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which included students such as his student William
James and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Except for teaching logic at Johns Hopkins University as an adjunct from 1879 to 1884, and some lectures that he gave at Harvard and the Lowell Institute in Boston, he could not find a permanent teaching position. So he joined the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.
