Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), the polymath founder of pragmatism, was for some time after his death mainly known in the United States as William James's friend and John Dewey's logic instructor. He was more highly regarded in countries other than his own: one could find Peirce scholars in China, Canada, throughout Europe (including Russia), and in South America. Two of Peirce's most renowned students today are the Italian linguist, semiotician, and novelist Umberto Eco and the Russian-born Belgian 1977 Nobel laureate in physical chemistry and chaos theory, Ilya Prigogine. Eco has written and spoken extensively on Peirce and has used Peirce's theory of semiotics (the study of signs) in his own works in language and communication theory and practice. Eco's novels are also implicitly filled with Peirce's philosophy and logic. For example, in Eco's medieval murder mystery Il nome della rosa (1980; translated as The Name of the Rose...