That would be very impressive, but I don't see that in any of the stuff on his semiotics on Wikipedia.

A caveat: I'm not at all sure how much I'm projecting on Peirce as far as this point goes. I personally think that his writings clarified my views on the scientific method (at the time I originally read them, which was a good while back) and I was concurrently thinking about machine learning - so I might just be having a case of cached apophenia.

However; if you want a condensed version of his semiotic look over this. You might actually need to read some of the rest of that article (which, I admit, is a bit long) to put it in more context. Also, this wikipedia page looks pretty comprehensive. I'm pretty confident that they're leaving a bit out that might be clearer if you read Peirce, but I'm not sure of how much instrumental value that would be to you. The issue with reading Peirce is that he was a crazy hermit with thousands of unpublished notes who continuously updated his views in significant ways (another point for him, he continued to reconsider/shift his views in a systematic way until he died), so lots of what you read about/by Peirce is compiled from a vast repository of his notes collected from his workspace after his death.

Also, something neat I found: Peirce's three valued logic predating Post. That was among his tens of thousands of unpublished pages of notes. Going further in this direction, I found an interesting article on Peirce's logic. There is some interesting discussion there about his influence on modern logic.

Points for coolness - Simon Newcomb was quite possibly his evil arch-nemesis.

Anyway - I think what attracts me to Peirce the most is his seemingly endless ability to carve reality at the joints in novel (at the time at least) ways, coupled with his nearly superhuman productivity levels - I mean he was highly influential in the realm of statistical theory, his influence on experimental design was impressive, he invented an axiomatization for arithmetic before Peano, he invented a modern characterization of first-order logic on par with Frege's (but arguably with a more algebraic/model theoretic than syntactic approach), he was a skilled expositor and clear writer, he invented pragmaticism, he had a lifetime of smaller results in logic, earth sciences and mathematics that anyone would be proud of - what more could you want from a single person before you can understand why people admire them?

Oh, he seems to have disobeyed endoself's first law of philosophy: "Have as little to do with Hegel as possible."

I think it's significantly more forgivable for a contemporary of Hegel's to be influenced by him than someone today being influenced by him. Further, when I say "influenced" - he scavenged a set of ideas that he seems to have reinterpreted in terms of his own philosophy because he saw that they could round out his ideas in a variety of ways - he was still pretty critical of Hegel of some major points. I think just browsing through these excerpts reveals the lines of influence a bit.