Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory".
42 Facts About Claude Shannon
2.
The Shannon family lived in Gaylord, Michigan, and Claude was born in a hospital in nearby Petoskey.
3.
Claude Shannon's mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon, was a language teacher, who served as the principal of Gaylord High School.
4.
Claude Shannon's family was active in their Methodist Church during his youth.
5.
Claude Shannon's childhood hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin.
6.
In 1932, Claude Shannon entered the University of Michigan, where he was introduced to the work of George Boole.
7.
Claude Shannon graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees: one in electrical engineering and the other in mathematics.
8.
In 1936, Claude Shannon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at MIT, where he worked on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, an early analog computer.
9.
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.
10.
The theoretical rigor of Claude Shannon's work superseded the ad hoc methods that had prevailed previously.
11.
Claude Shannon received his PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940.
12.
In 1940, Claude Shannon became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
13.
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.
14.
Claude Shannon then joined Bell Labs 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.
15.
Claude Shannon is credited with the invention of signal-flow graphs, in 1942.
16.
Claude Shannon discovered the topological gain formula while investigating the functional operation of an analog computer.
17.
For two months early in 1943, Claude Shannon came into contact with the leading British mathematician Alan Turing.
18.
Claude Shannon was interested in the encipherment of speech and to this end spent time at Bell Labs.
19.
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".
20.
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.
21.
Claude Shannon's concepts were popularized, subject to his own proofreading, in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise.
22.
Claude Shannon is credited with the introduction of sampling theory, which is concerned with representing a continuous-time signal from a discrete set of samples.
23.
Claude Shannon returned to MIT to hold an endowed chair in 1956.
24.
In 1956 Claude Shannon joined the MIT faculty to work in the Research Laboratory of Electronics.
25.
Claude Shannon continued to serve on the MIT faculty until 1978.
26.
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.
27.
Claude Shannon invented many devices, including a Roman numeral computer called THROBAC, and juggling machines.
28.
Claude Shannon built a device that could solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle.
29.
Claude Shannon designed the Minivac 601, a digital computer trainer to teach business people about how computers functioned.
30.
Claude Shannon is considered the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O Thorp.
31.
Claude Shannon married Norma Levor, a wealthy, Jewish, left-wing intellectual in January 1940.
32.
Claude Shannon met his second wife, Betty Claude Shannon, when she was a numerical analyst at Bell Labs.
33.
Betty assisted Claude Shannon in building some of his most famous inventions.
34.
The Bit Player, a feature film about Claude Shannon directed by Mark Levinson premiered at the World Science Festival in 2019.
35.
Claude Shannon's mouse appears to have been the first artificial learning device of its kind.
36.
In 1949 Claude Shannon completed a paper which estimates the game-tree complexity of chess, which is approximately 10.
37.
On March 9,1949, Claude Shannon presented a paper called "Programming a Computer for playing Chess".
38.
Claude Shannon described how to program a computer to play chess based on position scoring and move selection.
39.
Claude Shannon proposed basic strategies for restricting the number of possibilities to be considered in a game of chess.
40.
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.
41.
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.
42.
Claude Shannon formulated a version of Kerckhoffs' principle as "The enemy knows the system".