1. Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor, known as the "father of information theory" and credited with laying the foundations of the Information Age.
66 Facts About Claude Shannon
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Roboticist Rodney Brooks declared that Shannon was the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies, and mathematician Solomon W Golomb described his intellectual achievement as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century".
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Claude Shannon graduated from MIT in 1940 with a PhD in mathematics; his thesis focusing on genetics contained important results, while initially going unpublished.
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Claude 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".
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The work of Claude Shannon was foundational for symmetric-key cryptography, including the work of Horst Feistel, the Data Encryption Standard, and the Advanced Encryption Standard.
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Claude Shannon formally introduced the term "bit", and was a co-inventor of both pulse-code modulation and the first wearable computer.
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Claude Shannon made numerous contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, including co-organizing the 1956 Dartmouth workshop considered to be the discipline's founding event, and papers on the programming of chess computers.
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The Shannon family lived in Gaylord, Michigan, and Claude was born in a hospital that was nearby Petoskey.
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Claude Shannon's mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon, was a language teacher, who served as the principal of Gaylord High School.
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Claude Shannon's family was active in their Methodist Church during his youth.
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Claude Shannon's childhood hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin.
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In 1932, Claude Shannon entered the University of Michigan, where he was introduced to the work of George Boole.
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Claude Shannon graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees: one in electrical engineering and the other in mathematics.
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In 1936, Claude Shannon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, which was an early analog computer that was composed of electromechanical parts and could solve differential equations.
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Claude Shannon's work differed significantly from the work of previous engineers such as Akira Nakashima, who still relied on the existent circuit theory of the time and took a grounded approach.
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Claude Shannon's idea were more abstract and relied on mathematics, thereby breaking new ground with his work, with his approach dominating modern-day electrical engineering.
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Claude Shannon's work became the foundation of digital circuit design, as it became widely known in the electrical engineering community during and after World War II.
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The theoretical rigor of Claude Shannon's work superseded the ad hoc methods that had prevailed previously.
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Claude Shannon received his PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940.
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However, the thesis went unpublished after Claude Shannon lost interest, but it did contain important results.
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In 1940, Claude Shannon became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
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In Princeton, Claude Shannon had the opportunity to discuss his ideas with influential scientists and mathematicians such as Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann, and he had occasional encounters with Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel.
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Claude Shannon had worked at Bell Labs for a few months in the summer of 1937, and returned there to work on fire-control systems and cryptography during World War II, under a contract with section D-2 of the National Defense Research Committee.
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Claude Shannon is credited with the invention of signal-flow graphs, in 1942.
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Claude Shannon discovered the topological gain formula while investigating the functional operation of an analog computer.
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For two months early in 1943, Claude Shannon came into contact with the leading British mathematician Alan Turing.
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Claude Shannon was interested in the encipherment of speech and to this end spent time at Bell Labs.
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Claude Shannon said that his wartime insights into communication theory and cryptography developed simultaneously, and that "they were so close together you couldn't separate them".
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Claude Shannon developed information entropy as a measure of the information content in a message, which is a measure of uncertainty reduced by the message.
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Claude Shannon's concepts were popularized, subject to his own proofreading, in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise.
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Claude Shannon is credited with the introduction of sampling theorem, which he had derived as early as 1940, and which is concerned with representing a continuous-time signal from a discrete set of samples.
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Claude Shannon further wrote a paper in 1956 regarding coding for a noisy channel, which became a classic paper in the field of information theory.
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Claude Shannon's influence has been immense in the field, for example, in a 1973 collection of the key papers in the field of information theory, he was author or coauthor of 12 of the 49 papers cited, while no one else appeared more than three times.
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In 1950, Claude Shannon designed and built, with the help of his wife, a learning machine named Theseus.
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Claude Shannon wrote multiple influential papers on artificial intelligence, such as his 1950 paper titled "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", and his 1953 paper titled "Computers and Automata".
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Claude Shannon shared McCarthy's goal of creating a science of intelligent machines, but held a broader view of viable approaches in automata studies, such as neural nets, Turing machines, cybernetic mechanisms, and symbolic processing by computer.
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Claude Shannon co-organized and participated in the Dartmouth workshop of 1956, alongside John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester, and which is considered the founding event of the field of artificial intelligence.
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In 1956 Claude Shannon joined the MIT faculty, holding an endowed chair.
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Claude Shannon worked in the Research Laboratory of Electronics.
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Claude Shannon continued to serve on the MIT faculty until 1978.
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Claude Shannon developed Alzheimer's disease and spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home; he died in 2001, survived by his wife, a son and daughter, and two granddaughters.
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Claude Shannon invented many devices, including a Roman numeral computer called THROBAC, and juggling machines.
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Claude Shannon built a device that could solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle.
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Claude Shannon invented flame-throwing trumpets, rocket-powered frisbees, and plastic foam shoes for navigating a lake, and which to an observer, would appear as if Claude Shannon was walking on water.
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Claude Shannon designed the Minivac 601, a digital computer trainer to teach business people about how computers functioned.
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Claude Shannon is further considered the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O Thorp.
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Claude Shannon married Norma Levor, a wealthy, Jewish, left-wing intellectual in January 1940.
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Claude Shannon met his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore, when she was a numerical analyst at Bell Labs.
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Betty assisted Claude Shannon in building some of his most famous inventions.
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In June 1954, Claude Shannon was listed as one of the top 20 most important scientists in America by Fortune.
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Claude Shannon is credited by many as single-handedly creating information theory and for laying the foundations for the Digital Age.
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Claude Shannon's achievements are considered to be on par with those of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin.
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The artificial intelligence large language model family Claude was named in Shannon's honor.
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The Bit Player, a feature film about Claude Shannon directed by Mark Levinson premiered at the World Science Festival in 2019.
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Claude Shannon's mouse appears to have been the first artificial learning device of its kind.
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In 1949 Claude Shannon completed a paper which estimates the game-tree complexity of chess, which is approximately 10.
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On March 9,1949, Claude Shannon presented a paper called "Programming a Computer for playing Chess".
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Claude Shannon described how to program a computer to play chess based on position scoring and move selection.
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Claude Shannon proposed basic strategies for restricting the number of possibilities to be considered in a game of chess.
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In 1950, Claude Shannon wrote an article titled "A Chess-Playing Machine", which was published in Scientific American.
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Claude Shannon's process for having the computer decide on which move to make was a minimax procedure, based on an evaluation function of a given chess position.
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Claude Shannon gave a rough example of an evaluation function in which the value of the black position was subtracted from that of the white position.
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Claude Shannon formulated a version of Kerckhoffs' principle as "The enemy knows the system".
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Claude Shannon was known as a successful investor who gave lectures on investing.
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One such method of Claude Shannon's was labeled Claude Shannon's demon, which was to form a portfolio of equal parts cash and a stock, and rebalance regularly to take advantage of the stock's randomly jittering price movements.
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Claude Shannon was one of the first investors to download stock prices, and a snapshot of his portfolio in 1981 was found to be $582,717.50, translating to $1.5 million in 2015, excluding another one of his stocks.