Claude Shannon
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Information theory
- Nationality
- American
Founded information theory in a single 1948 paper — having already, as a student, shown that Boolean algebra describes electrical circuits.
His 1937 master's thesis connected nineteenth-century logic to relay circuits and became the basis of all digital circuit design. Eleven years later came "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", which introduced the bit as a measure of information, defined entropy for information sources, and proved that every channel has an exact capacity limit below which error-free transmission is possible.
The result was counter-intuitive and decisive: noise limits not accuracy but speed. Everything from modems to mobile networks to error-correcting codes on hard drives works against Shannon's limit. Alongside the research he built juggling machines and a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze.