  Peirce’s father Benjamin Peirce was Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and was one of the founders of, and for a while  a director of, the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey as well as one of the founders of the Smithsonian Institution.  The department of mathematics at Harvard was essentially built by Benjamin. From his father, Charles Sanders Peirce received most of the substance of his early education as well as a good deal of intellectual encouragement and stimulation. Benjamin’s didactic technique mostly took the form of setting interesting problems for his son and checking Charles’s solutions to them. In this challenging instructional atmosphere Charles acquired his lifelong habit of thinking through philosophical and scientific problems entirely on his own. To this habit, perhaps, is to be attributed Charles Peirce’s considerable originality.