Hugh MacColl

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Hugh MacColl (1837-1909) was a Scot who trained as a mathematician and evolved into a logician. He is known for two accomplishments:

In 1877-79, while working out a problem involving integration, he published a four-part article setting out the first known variant of the propositional calculus, calling it the "calculus of equivalent statements", anteceding Frege's Begriffschrifft. He subsequently published 11 articles in Mind, 1880-1908, and a text, MacColl (1906), in an effort to draw the attention of philosophers to his work.
C. I. Lewis credited MacColl's late work on the nature of implication as the source of the basic ideas behind Lewis's pathbreaking work in modal logic.

MacColl was not obscure in his day. He was a lifelong regular contributor to the Educational Times. His correspondents included the logicians William Stanley Jevons and Charles Peirce. He also corresponded, and argued in print, with the young Bertrand Russell, and reviewed Alfred North Whitehead's 1898 Universal Algebra for Mind. Nor is he forgotten now; there is an ongoing MacColl Project, a joint venture of Grefswald University in Germany and the University of Oslo, which intends to publish a critical edition of his work. The December 1999 issue of the Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic published the proceedings of a 1998 conference devoted to MacColl's work.

MacColl published two novels, now forgotten yet containing elements of science fiction, that reveal social and moral values to which he gave full expression in his 1909 Man's Origin, Destiny, and Duty, an apology for Christianity.

[edit] References

1906. Symbolic Logic and Its Applications. Longmans, Green.
Kneebone, G., 2001 (1963). Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics. Dover. Contains a brief introduction to the "calculus of equivalent statements."
Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.