Claude E. Shannon

Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001) was an American mathematician and electrical engineer.

Life

Claude Elwood Shannon was born April 30, 1916 in Petosky, MI. He earned a BS in both electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1936. His Master's thesis in electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship, thereby establishing the theory behind digital computing and digital circuits. He also completed a PhD in mathematics at MIT with a dissertation focused on genetics.

In 1940, Shannon became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He worked at Bell Labs on fire-control systems and cryptography during World War II under a contract with the National Defense Research Committee. In 1956 Shannon joined the MIT faculty, holding an endowed chair. He worked in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and continued to serve on the MIT faculty until 1978, then as emeritus professor. He died Feb 24, 2001 in Medford, MA.

Contributions

Shannon's extensive contributions to and influence on circuitry, computing, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and much more are covered in detail elsewhere.[1]

His communication theory built on two insights: (i) That information reflects choices made; and thus reduces uncertainty and (ii) that information is inversely proportional to the amount of uncertainty. Further, probability can be used as a measure of uncertainty.

Shannon was concerned with the engineering problem of transmitting a message and he was explicit that his theory had nothing to do with meaning. "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem," he wrote. His theory became known as "information theory" despite the ambiguity concerning whether "information" relates to meaning. This ambiguity and Warren Weaver's popularization, which implied that Shannon's communication theory of the reliability of digital signals could be extended to include the transmission of meaning, has resulted in the relevance of Shannon's work to documentation and information services being widely widely misunderstood.

Shannon worked briefly on Vannevar Bush's microfilm rapid selector.

Publications

• The mathematical theory of communication. With Warren Weaver. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1949.

Further reading

• "Claude Shannon." Wikipedia [2]
• Badia, Antonio. The Information Manifold. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019, esp chap 2.
• Soni, Jimmy, & Rob Goodman. A mind at play: How Claude Shannon invented the information age. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Papers

• Library of Congress. Manuscript Division. Claude Elwood Shannon Papers. ID No. MSS84831. 1932-1995 (bulk 1938-1989). [3]