Claude Shannon

Life

Born April 30, 1916, in Petoskey, Michigan. In 1936 he took two bachelor's degrees, in electrical engineering and mathematics, at the University of Michigan, then went on to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he completed his master's thesis in 1937 and his doctoral thesis in mathematics in 1940. From 1941 he worked at Bell Laboratories, and from 1957 he was a professor at MIT. In his later years he suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and he died on February 24, 2001, in Medford, Massachusetts.

Switching circuits and Boolean algebra

In his 1937 master's thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", he showed that with Boolean algebra any logical relation could be built from electrical switching circuits. This result became the foundation of circuit design for later digital computers.

Information theory

In 1948, while at Bell Laboratories, he published the paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". It introduced the concept of "information entropy", which defines the amount of information on the basis of probability, and made it possible to treat the process of communication mathematically: the information source, encoding, the noisy channel, and decoding. This paper was also the first to use the "bit" as a unit of information; the word itself is said to have been coined by the statistician John Tukey. In a 1949 paper he proved the sampling theorem, giving the theoretical foundation for converting analog signals to digital.

During the Second World War he worked on fire control and cryptography, and the results were published as the 1949 paper "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", which became one of the foundations of modern cryptography.

Other work and recognition

In 1950 he built Theseus, a learning machine regarded as an early attempt at artificial intelligence, and in 1956 he took part in organizing the Dartmouth conference, regarded as the starting point of artificial intelligence research. He also wrote a paper on programming a computer to play chess. In 1985 he received the first Kyoto Prize (Basic Sciences), and he received many other awards, including the National Medal of Science and the IEEE Medal of Honor.