Claude Shannon
1916 – 2001 American mathematician, electrical engineer
American mathematician who founded information theory and gave the bit its meaning as the unit of information.
- Affiliations
- Bell Labs, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Claude Shannon showed as a young man that electrical switching circuits could carry out Boolean logic, the insight that underlies all digital design. His 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication founded information theory, defining information in bits and setting the limits on how much can be sent over a noisy channel. His work made possible reliable digital communication, data compression, and error correction. He was also a playful inventor and an early explorer of machine learning and chess-playing machines at Bell Labs.
Connections
- associate of Alan Turing — Met Turing at Bell Labs during the war and traded ideas on computing and cryptography.
- associate of John von Neumann — Contemporary at the founding of computing and information theory.
- associate of John von Neumann — Fellow founder of the mathematical basis of computing.
In the timeline
- 1937 Shannon's thesis links relays to Boolean logic mentioned