Claude Shannon

Lore & Background

Shannon was among the first to describe the use of Boolean algebra—essential to all digital electronic circuits—and helped found the field of artificial intelligence. The roboticist Rodney Brooks declared Shannon the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies, and the mathematician Solomon W. Golomb described his intellectual achievement as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century". At the University of Michigan, Shannon graduated with Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics, both in 1936. The following year, in his MIT electrical engineering master's thesis "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", he demonstrated that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship, thereby establishing the theory behind digital computing and digital circuits. Called by some the most important master's thesis of all time, it is the "birth certificate of the digital revolution", and started him in a lifetime of work that led him to win a Kyoto Prize in 1985. He graduated from MIT in 1940 with a PhD in mathematics; his thesis, which focused on genetics, contained important results though it remained unpublished and relatively unknown until recently. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense of the United States during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications, writing a paper which is considered one of the foundational pieces of modern cryptography, with his work described as "a turning point, and marked the closure of classical cryptography and the beginning of modern cryptography". His work was foundational for symmetric-key cryptography, including the work of Horst Feistel, the Data Encryption Standard (DES), and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). As a result, Shannon has been called the "founding father of modern cryptography". His 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" laid the foundations for the field of information theory, referred to as a "blueprint for the digital era" by electrical engineer Robert G. Gallager and "the Magna Carta of the Information Age" by Scientific American. Golomb compared Shannon's influence on the digital age to that which "the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature". Shannon is also regarded as the most important p

Reader's Guide

Claude Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan, and grew up in Gaylord, Michigan. He attended public school in Gaylord and graduated from Gaylord High School in 1932. He entered the University of Michigan in 1932 and graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees: one in electrical engineering and the other in mathematics. He began graduate studies at MIT in 1936, where he worked on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer. In 1937 he wrote his master's thesis, which won the 1939 Alfred Noble Prize. He received his PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940. He became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1940. He worked at Bell Labs for a few months in the summer of 1937. During World War II he contributed to cryptanalysis for national defense. He joined the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Cryptologic Advisory Group in 1951. From 1956 to 1978 he was a professor at MIT. He died on February 24, 2001.

Did You Know?

• Shannon's master's thesis is called by some the most important master's thesis of all time and the 'birth certificate of the digital revolution'.
• Shannon formally introduced the term 'bit'.
• Shannon was a co-inventor of the first wearable computer.
• Shannon's Theseus machine was the first electrical device to learn by trial and error.
• Shannon's childhood hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"A few first rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half-finished. The latter are no credit to their writers and a waste of time to their readers." — Claude Shannon "IRE Transactions on Information Theory (1956), volume 2, issue 1, page 3. Shannon, Claude E. (March 1956), The Bandwagon, 2, doi:10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774 ." — Claude Shannon "Coding Theorems for a Discrete Source With a Fidelity Criterion". IRE International Convention Records, volume 7, pp. 142--163, 1959." — Claude Shannon "Scientific American (1971), volume 225, page 180." — Claude Shannon