Claude Shannon

US scientist Claude Elwood Shannon was author of The Mathematical Theory of Communication (PDF), a seminal work in information theory once described as "the magna carta of the information age".

     life 

Born in 1916, Shannon was a distant relation of Thomas Edison and shared that inventor's passion for tinkering but not, apparently, his mania for self-promotion. He grew up in Gaylord, Michigan, almost as a parody of the fin de siecle boy scientist: building model planes, a radio-controlled boat and telegraph system; earning pocket money from a paper route and delivering telegrams.

Shannon graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. He moved to MIT the same year, as research assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Research at MIT initially involved the Bush differential analyzer, at that time a state-of-the-art electro-mechanical calculator developed by Vannevar Bush (considered in the profile of the net), author of the 'memex' concept that is sometimes mistakenly considered the precursor of hypertext or the web. Shannon became interested in the theory of electrical circuits, reflected in his Master's thesis about use of Boolean algebra in analysis of data systems.

     thesis

The thesis is considered a seminal contribution to circuit design, providing a theoretical basis for the silicon chip. Under Bush's auspices, Shannon moved to MIT's Maths Department, with a doctoral dissertation on An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics. Interest in the biosciences continued; like Turing he considered that information theory could be applied to biological systems. In 1940 he was awarded a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Doctorate in Mathematics.

Reflecting the twin parents of the internet - business and the military - Shannon worked in Bell Labs and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on automated control systems for anti-aircraft guns.

His major work on information theory, A Mathematical Theory of Communication appeared in 1948, providing a foundation for mathematical analysis of information systems that range from the telegraph to face-to-face conversation. It has been described as "the magna carta of the information age".

There's an engineering perspective in the Network guide. For a dissenting view, emphasising content analysis, see Dan Schiller's Theorizing Communication: A History (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1996). Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2002) offers insights about Shannon the man and his influence on US economic theory.

Shannon's subsequent publications included Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, Programming a Computer for Playing Chess, studies of circuit reliability and the stock market, particularly optimal investment strategies.

After a fellowship at the Center for the Study of the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto ("I'm a machine and you're a machine, and we both think, don't we?") he became Donner Professor of Science at MIT in 1959, retaining an affiliation with Bell Labs until 1972.

     cycles, rats and pogo-sticks

Apart from inventing a rocket-powered Frisbee and juggling eggs while riding his unicycle through academic buildings, Shannon was famous for his interest in automata and toys, with a collection that included seven chess machines, mechanical rats, a petrol-powered pogo-stick, a two-seater unicycle, a WC Fields automaton, a machine to solve the Rubik cube and a Roman numeral-based calculator.

     bibliography

There's a full bibliography of Shannon's published papers at the AT&T research labs site. It is drawn from Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers (Piscataway: IEEE Press 1993) edited by Neil Sloane & Aaron Wyner.



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