Claude Shannon

He grew up in Gaylord, Michigan, where his father ran a business and sat for a while as a probate judge and his mother taught languages and served as principal of the high school. He built model planes, a radio-controlled boat, and a telegraph line strung along a barbed-wire fence to a friend's house half a mile off, and carried messages for Western Union. He learned later that Thomas Edison was a distant cousin, both of them descended from a colonial settler named John Ogden. He took two bachelor's degrees at Michigan in 1936, one in electrical engineering and one in mathematics, and went to MIT to run Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer. He was 21 when he wrote the thesis that mattered.

The 1937 thesis showed that the operations of Boolean logic map exactly onto arrangements of electrical switches, so a circuit can carry out an argument. Every digital device since rests on it. He then took a mathematics doctorate in 1940 on the algebra of Mendelian genetics and never published it. At Bell Labs he spent the war on fire control and cryptography, and talked with Alan Turing for two months in 1943. In 1948 he published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which defined the bit, showed that any message can be counted in bits, and proved that a noisy channel has an exact capacity below which you can transmit with arbitrarily small error. Compression and error correction both begin there. The following year he proved a one-time pad unbreakable, and put cryptography on a mathematical footing for the first time.

He did not follow up. The genetics doctorate went unpublished because the subject stopped holding him. He lectured on investing and never wrote the paper, though a Barron's survey in August 1986 found his portfolio had beaten 1,025 of 1,026 mutual funds, a point ahead of Warren Buffett's long-run return. Instead he built things: a calculator that worked in Roman numerals, a mechanical mouse called Theseus that learned a maze and could be set down anywhere in it and find the target, juggling machines, flame-throwing trumpets, rocket-powered frisbees, foam shoes for walking on a lake, and, with the blackjack mathematician Edward Thorp, a concealed computer for beating roulette. He joined the CIA's Special Cryptologic Advisory Group in 1951 and co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that named artificial intelligence. The field he had opened went on largely without him.

He taught at MIT until 1978, took the National Medal of Science in 1966 and the Kyoto Prize in 1985, and then Alzheimer's disease took the rest. He spent his last years in a nursing home and died in Medford, Massachusetts, on February 24, 2001. The work travelled much further than the name: every compressed file, every error-correcting code, every modem is an application of the 1948 paper, and almost nobody using one could name him. That began to shift at the centenary in 2016, with a Google Doodle, a year of commemorations, and a 2019 documentary called The Bit Player. Solomon Golomb's comparison holds: Shannon did for the digital age what the inventor of the alphabet did for writing.

Claude Shannon's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits article
  The MIT master's thesis that put Boolean algebra into hardware 1937
• An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics article
  His doctoral thesis, never published — he lost interest 1940
• A Mathematical Theory of Communication article
  Entropy, channel capacity and the bit 1948
• Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems article
  Declassified wartime work proving the one-time pad unbreakable 1949
• Theseus invention
  A relay-driven mouse that learned a maze, built with Betty Shannon 1950
• Programming a Computer for Playing Chess article
  One of the founding papers of computer game-playing 1950

• 1932 aged ~16 Graduates from Gaylord High School, where his mother was principal He had already built a barbed-wire telegraph to a friend's house half a mile away.
• 1936 aged ~20 Takes two bachelor's degrees at Michigan, in engineering and mathematics
• 1937 aged ~21 Writes the master's thesis that puts logic into circuits, at 21
• 1940 aged ~24 Takes a mathematics doctorate on genetics and never publishes it He went on to the Institute for Advanced Study as a National Research Fellow.
• 1943 aged ~27 Spends two months in conversation with Alan Turing at Bell Labs Turing had come to share Bletchley Park's methods with the US Navy.
• 1948 aged ~32 Publishes A Mathematical Theory of Communication Scientific American later called it the Magna Carta of the information age.
• 1956 aged ~40 Joins the MIT faculty and co-organizes the Dartmouth workshop The meeting generally treated as the founding of artificial intelligence.
• August 11, 1986 aged 70 Barron's finds his portfolio has beaten 1,025 of 1,026 mutual funds He never wrote up the method.
• February 24, 2001 aged 84 Dies in a Medford nursing home after years of Alzheimer's disease

• Vannevar Bush 1890–1974
  Built the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept. mentor at MIT
• Thomas Edison 1847–1931
  Inventor and scientist whose research laboratory model and electrical innovations transformed modern life. distant cousin
• Norbert Wiener 1894–1964
  Mathematician who founded cybernetics, influencing computing, automation, neuroscience, and theories of communication and control. rival claim on the theory of information
• John McCarthy 1927–2011
  Coined the term artificial intelligence and created the Lisp programming language. co-organized the Dartmouth workshop with
• John von Neumann 1903–1957
  Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing. colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study
• Bob Kahn b. 1938
  Co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols alongside Vint Cerf, enabling modern digital communication. built the networks his mathematics made possible