Claude Shannon
Shannon c. 1950s
Born	Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-04-30)April 30, 1916 Petoskey, Michigan, U.S.
Died	February 24, 2001(2001-02-24) (aged 84) Medford, Massachusetts, U.S.
Education	University of Michigan (BS, BSE) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS, PhD)
Known for	Information theory Artificial intelligence Boolean algebra Binary code Data compression Digital electronics Entropy in information theory Logic gate Pulse-code modulation Sampling Symmetric-key cryptography Switching circuit theory Units of information Wearable computer
Spouses	Norma Levor (m. 1940; div. 1941) Betty Shannon (m. 1949⁠–⁠2001)
Awards	Alfred Noble Prize (1939) Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize (1949) Stuart Ballantine Medal (1955) IEEE Medal of Honor (1966) National Medal of Science (1966) Harvey Prize (1972) Claude E. Shannon Award (1973) Harold Pender Award (1978) John Fritz Medal (1983) Kyoto Prize (1985) Audio Engineering Society Gold Medal Award (1985) Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award (2000) National Inventors Hall of Fame (2004)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics, computer science, electronic engineering, artificial intelligence
Institutions	Bell Labs Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study
Theses	A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits (1937) An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics (1940)
Doctoral advisor	Frank Lauren Hitchcock
Doctoral students	Elwyn Berlekamp Danny Hillis Leonard Kleinrock Ivan Sutherland Bert Sutherland

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) 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.^[1]^[2]^[3] Shannon was the first to describe the use of Boolean algebra that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and was one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence.^[4]^[5]^[6] Roboticist Rodney Brooks declared that Shannon was the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies,^[7] and mathematician Solomon W. Golomb described his intellectual achievement as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century".^[8]

At the University of Michigan, Shannon dual degreed, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in both electrical engineering and mathematics in 1936. A 21-year-old master's degree student in electrical engineering at MIT, his thesis "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" demonstrated that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship,^[9] thereby establishing the theory behind digital computing and digital circuits.^[10] The thesis has been claimed to be the most important master's thesis of all time,^[9] having been called the "birth certificate of the digital revolution",^[11] and winning the 1939 Alfred Noble Prize.^[12] He graduated from MIT in 1940 with a PhD in mathematics;^[13] his thesis focusing on genetics contained important results, while initially going unpublished.^[14]

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,^[15] with his work described as "a turning point, and marked the closure of classical cryptography and the beginning of modern cryptography".^[16] The work of Shannon was foundational for symmetric-key cryptography, including the work of Horst Feistel, the Data Encryption Standard (DES), and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).^[16] As a result, Shannon has been called the "founding father of modern cryptography".^[17]

His 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" laid the foundations for the field of information theory,^[18]^[13] referred to as a "blueprint for the digital era" by electrical engineer Robert G. Gallager^[19] and "the Magna Carta of the Information Age" by Scientific American.^[20]^[21] Golomb compared Shannon's influence on the digital age to that which "the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature".^[18] Advancements across multiple scientific disciplines utilized Shannon's theory—including the invention of the compact disc, the development of the Internet, the commercialization of mobile telephony, and the understanding of black holes.^[22]^[23] He also formally introduced the term "bit",^[24]^[2] and was a co-inventor of both pulse-code modulation and the first wearable computer.

Shannon made numerous contributions to the field of artificial intelligence,^[4] including co-organizing the 1956 Dartmouth workshop considered to be the discipline's founding event,^[25]^[26] and papers on the programming of chess computers.^[27]^[28] His Theseus machine was the first electrical device to learn by trial and error, being one of the first examples of artificial intelligence.^[7]^[29]

Biography

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Childhood

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The Shannon family lived in Gaylord, Michigan, and Claude was born in a hospital that was nearby Petoskey.^[5] His father, Claude Sr. (1862–1934), was a businessman and, for a while, a judge of probate in Gaylord. His mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon (1880–1945), was a language teacher, who also served as the principal of Gaylord High School.^[30] Claude Sr. was a descendant of New Jersey settlers, while Mabel was a child of German immigrants.^[5] Shannon's family was active in their Methodist Church during his youth.^[31]

Most of the first 16 years of Shannon's life were spent in Gaylord, where he attended public school, graduating from Gaylord High School in 1932. Shannon showed an inclination towards mechanical and electrical things. His best subjects were science and mathematics. At home, he constructed such devices as models of planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a barbed-wire telegraph system to a friend's house a half-mile away.^[32] While growing up, he also worked as a messenger for the Western Union company.

Shannon's childhood hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin. Both Shannon and Edison were descendants of John Ogden (1609–1682), a colonial leader and an ancestor of many distinguished people.^[33]^[34]

Logic circuits

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In 1932, Shannon entered the University of Michigan, where he was introduced to the work of George Boole. He graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees: one in electrical engineering and the other in mathematics.

In 1936, Shannon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 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.^[35] While studying the complicated ad hoc circuits of this analyzer, Shannon designed switching circuits based on Boole's concepts. In 1937, he wrote his master's degree thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,^[36] with a paper from this thesis published in 1938.^[36] A revolutionary work for switching circuit theory, Shannon diagramed switching circuits that could implement the essential operators of Boolean algebra. Then he proved that his switching circuits could be used to simplify the arrangement of the electromechanical relays that were used during that time in telephone call routing switches. Next, he expanded this concept, proving that these circuits could solve all problems that Boolean algebra could solve. In the last chapter, he presented diagrams of several circuits, including a digital 4-bit full adder.^[36] His 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.^[37] 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.^[37]

Using electrical switches to implement logic is the fundamental concept that underlies all electronic digital computers. 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. The theoretical rigor of Shannon's work superseded the ad hoc methods that had prevailed previously. Howard Gardner hailed Shannon's thesis "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."^[38] Herman Goldstine described it as "surely ... one of the most important master's theses ever written ... It helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science."^[39] One of the reviewers of his work commented that "To the best of my knowledge, this is the first application of the methods of symbolic logic to so practical an engineering problem. From the point of view of originality I rate the paper as outstanding."^[40] Shannon's master's thesis won the 1939 Alfred Noble Prize.

Shannon received his PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940.^[33] Vannevar Bush had suggested that Shannon should work on his dissertation at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in order to develop a mathematical formulation for Mendelian genetics. This research resulted in Shannon's PhD thesis, called An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.^[41] However, the thesis went unpublished after Shannon lost interest, but it did contain important results.^[14] Notably, he was one of the first to apply an algebraic framework to study theoretical population genetics.^[42] In addition, Shannon devised a general expression for the distribution of several linked traits in a population after multiple generations under a random mating system, which was original at the time,^[43] with the new theorem unworked out by other population geneticists of the time.^[44]

In 1940, Shannon became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In Princeton, Shannon had the opportunity to discuss his ideas with influential scientists and mathematicians such as Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann, and he also had occasional encounters with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Shannon worked freely across disciplines, and this ability may have contributed to his later development of mathematical information theory.^[45]

Wartime research

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Shannon had worked at Bell Labs for a few months in the summer of 1937,^[46] and returned there to work on fire-control systems and cryptography during World War II, under a contract with section D-2 (Control Systems section) of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC).

Shannon is credited with the invention of signal-flow graphs, in 1942. He discovered the topological gain formula while investigating the functional operation of an analog computer.^[47]

For two months early in 1943, Shannon came into contact with the leading British mathematician Alan Turing. Turing had been posted to Washington to share with the U.S. Navy's cryptanalytic service the methods used by the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to break the cyphers used by the Kriegsmarine U-boats in the north Atlantic Ocean.^[48] He was also interested in the encipherment of speech and to this end spent time at Bell Labs. Shannon and Turing met at teatime in the cafeteria.^[48] Turing showed Shannon his 1936 paper that defined what is now known as the "universal Turing machine".^[49]^[50] This impressed Shannon, as many of its ideas complemented his own.

Shannon and his team developed anti-aircraft systems that tracked enemy missiles and planes, while also determining the paths for intercepting missiles.^[51]

In 1945, as the war was coming to an end, the NDRC was issuing a summary of technical reports as a last step prior to its eventual closing down. Inside the volume on fire control, a special essay titled Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems, coauthored by Shannon, Ralph Beebe Blackman, and Hendrik Wade Bode, formally treated the problem of smoothing the data in fire-control by analogy with "the problem of separating a signal from interfering noise in communications systems."^[52] In other words, it modeled the problem in terms of data and signal processing and thus heralded the coming of the Information Age.

Shannon's work on cryptography was even more closely related to his later publications on communication theory.^[53] At the close of the war, he prepared a classified memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography", dated September 1945. A declassified version of this paper was published in 1949 as "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in the Bell System Technical Journal. This paper incorporated many of the concepts and mathematical formulations that also appeared in his A Mathematical Theory of Communication. 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".^[54] In a footnote near the beginning of the classified report, Shannon announced his intention to "develop these results … in a forthcoming memorandum on the transmission of information."^[55]

While he was at Bell Labs, Shannon proved that the cryptographic one-time pad is unbreakable in his classified research that was later published in 1949. The same article also proved that any unbreakable system must have essentially the same characteristics as the one-time pad: the key must be truly random, as large as the plaintext, never reused in whole or part, and kept secret.^[56]

Information theory

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In 1948, the promised memorandum appeared as "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", an article in two parts in the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal. This work focuses on the problem of how best to encode the message a sender wants to transmit. Shannon developed information entropy as a measure of the information content in a message, which is a measure of uncertainty reduced by the message. In so doing, he essentially invented the field of information theory.

The book The Mathematical Theory of Communication^[57] reprints Shannon's 1948 article and Warren Weaver's popularization of it, which is accessible to the non-specialist. Weaver pointed out that the word "information" in communication theory is not related to what you do say, but to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. Shannon's concepts were also popularized, subject to his own proofreading, in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise.

Information theory's fundamental contribution to natural language processing and computational linguistics was further established in 1951, in his article "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", showing upper and lower bounds of entropy on the statistics of English – giving a statistical foundation to language analysis. In addition, he proved that treating space as the 27th letter of the alphabet actually lowers uncertainty in written language, providing a clear quantifiable link between cultural practice and probabilistic cognition.

Another notable paper published in 1949 is "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", a declassified version of his wartime work on the mathematical theory of cryptography, in which he proved that all theoretically unbreakable cyphers must have the same requirements as the one-time pad. He is credited with the introduction of sampling theorem, which he had derived as early as 1940,^[58] and which is concerned with representing a continuous-time signal from a (uniform) discrete set of samples. This theory was essential in enabling telecommunications to move from analog to digital transmissions systems in the 1960s and later. He further wrote a paper in 1956 regarding coding for a noisy channel, which also became a classic paper in the field of information theory.^[59] However, also in 1956 he wrote a one-page editorial for the "IRE Transactions on Information Theory" entitled "The Bandwagon" which he began by observing: "Information theory has, in the last few years, become something of a scientific bandwagon" and which he concluded by warning: "Only by maintaining a thoroughly scientific attitude can we achieve real progress in communication theory and consolidate our present position."^[60]

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.^[61] Even beyond his original paper in 1948, he is still regarded as the most important post-1948 contributor to the theory.^[61]

In May 1951, Mervin Kelly received a request from the director of the CIA, general Walter Bedell Smith, regarding Shannon and the need for him, as Shannon was regarded as, based on "the best authority", the "most eminently qualified scientist in the particular field concerned".^[62] As a result of the request, Shannon became part of the CIA's Special Cryptologic Advisory Group or SCAG.^[62]

In his time at Bell Labs, he also co-developed pulse-code modulation alongside Bernard M. Oliver, and John R. Pierce.^[63]^[64]

Artificial Intelligence

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In 1950, Shannon designed and built, with the help of his wife, a learning machine named Theseus. It consisted of a maze on a surface, through which a mechanical mouse could move. Below the surface were sensors that followed the path of a mechanical mouse through the maze. After much trial and error, this device would learn the shortest path through the maze, and direct the mechanical mouse through the maze. The pattern of the maze could be changed at will.^[29]

Mazin Gilbert stated that Theseus "inspired the whole field of AI. This random trial and error is the foundation of artificial intelligence."^[29]

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".^[65] Alongside John McCarthy, he co-edited a book titled Automata Studies, which was published in 1956.^[59] The categories in the articles within the volume were influenced by Shannon's own subject headings in his 1953 paper.^[59] Shannon shared McCarthy's goal of creating a science of intelligent machines, but also held a broader view of viable approaches in automata studies, such as neural nets, Turing machines, cybernetic mechanisms, and symbolic processing by computer.^[59]

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.^[66]^[26]

Teaching at MIT

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In 1956 Shannon joined the MIT faculty, holding an endowed chair. He worked in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He continued to serve on the MIT faculty until 1978.

Later life

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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.^[67]^[68]

Hobbies and inventions

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Outside of Shannon's academic pursuits, he was interested in juggling, unicycling, and chess. He also invented many devices, including a Roman numeral computer called THROBAC, and juggling machines.^[69]^[70] He built a device that could solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle.^[33]

Shannon also invented flame-throwing trumpets, rocket-powered frisbees, and plastic foam shoes for navigating a lake, and which to an observer, would appear as if Shannon was walking on water.^[71]

Shannon designed the Minivac 601, a digital computer trainer to teach business people about how computers functioned. It was sold by the Scientific Development Corp starting in 1961.^[72]

He is further considered the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O. Thorp.^[73] The device was used to improve the odds when playing roulette.

Personal life

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Shannon married Norma Levor, a wealthy, Jewish, left-wing intellectual in January 1940. The marriage ended in divorce after about a year. Levor later married Ben Barzman.^[74]

Shannon met his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore (Betty), when she was a numerical analyst at Bell Labs. They were married in 1949.^[67] Betty assisted Claude in building some of his most famous inventions.^[75] They had three children.^[76]

Shannon presented himself as apolitical and an atheist.^[77]

Tributes and legacy

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There are six statues of Shannon sculpted by Eugene Daub: one at the University of Michigan; one at MIT in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems; one in Gaylord, Michigan; one at the University of California, San Diego; one at Bell Labs; and another at AT&T Shannon Labs.^[78] The statue in Gaylord is located in the Claude Shannon Memorial Park.^[79] After the breakup of the Bell System, the part of Bell Labs that remained with AT&T Corporation was named Shannon Labs in his honor.

In June 1954, Shannon was listed as one of the top 20 most important scientists in America by Fortune.^[80] In 2013, information theory was listed as one of the top 10 revolutionary scientific theories by Science News.^[81]

According to Neil Sloane, an AT&T Fellow who co-edited Shannon's large collection of papers in 1993, the perspective introduced by Shannon's communication theory (now called "information theory") is the foundation of the digital revolution, and every device containing a microprocessor or microcontroller is a conceptual descendant of Shannon's publication in 1948:^[82] "He's one of the great men of the century. Without him, none of the things we know today would exist. The whole digital revolution started with him."^[83] The cryptocurrency unit shannon (a synonym for gwei) is named after him.^[84]

Shannon is credited by many as single-handedly creating information theory and for laying the foundations for the Digital Age.^[85]^[86]^[14]^[87]^[88]^[2]

His achievements are considered to be on par with those of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin.^[1]^[18]^[6]^[89]

The artificial intelligence large language model family Claude (language model) was named in Shannon's honor.^[90]

A Mind at Play, a biography of Shannon written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, was published in 2017.^[91] They described Shannon as "the most important genius you’ve never heard of, a man whose intellect was on par with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton".^[92] Consultant and writer Tom Rutledge, writing for Boston Review, stated that "Of the computer pioneers who drove the mid-20th-century information technology revolution—an elite men’s club of scholar-engineers who also helped crack Nazi codes and pinpoint missile trajectories—Shannon may have been the most brilliant of them all."^[89] Electrical engineer Robert Gallager stated about Shannon that "He had this amazing clarity of vision. Einstein had it, too – this ability to take on a complicated problem and find the right way to look at it, so that things become very simple."^[19] In an obituary by Neil Sloane and Robert Calderbank, they stated that "Shannon must rank near the top of the list of major figures of twentieth century science".^[93] Due to his work in multiple fields, Shannon is also regarded as a polymath.^[94]^[95]

Historian James Gleick noted the importance of Shannon, stating that "Einstein looms large, and rightly so. But we’re not living in the relativity age, we’re living in the information age. It’s Shannon whose fingerprints are on every electronic device we own, every computer screen we gaze into, every means of digital communication. He’s one of these people who so transform the world that, after the transformation, the old world is forgotten."^[3] Gleick further noted that "he created a whole field from scratch, from the brow of Zeus".^[3]

On April 30, 2016, Shannon was honored with a Google Doodle to celebrate his life on what would have been his 100th birthday.^[96]^[97]^[98]^[99]

The Bit Player, a feature film about Shannon directed by Mark Levinson premiered at the World Science Festival in 2019.^[100] Drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon in his house in the 1980s, the film was released on Amazon Prime in August 2020.

The Mathematical Theory of Communication

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Weaver's Contribution

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Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication,^[57] begins with an interpretation of his own work by Warren Weaver. Although Shannon's entire work is about communication itself, Warren Weaver communicated his ideas in such a way that those not acclimated to complex theory and mathematics could comprehend the fundamental laws he put forth. The coupling of their unique communicational abilities and ideas generated the Shannon-Weaver model, although the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings emanate entirely from Shannon's work after Weaver's introduction. For the layman, Weaver's introduction better communicates The Mathematical Theory of Communication,^[57] but Shannon's subsequent logic, mathematics, and expressive precision was responsible for defining the problem itself.

Other work

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Shannon and his electromechanical mouse *Theseus* (named after Theseus from Greek mythology) which he tried to have solve the maze in one of the first experiments in artificial intelligence

Shannon's mouse

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"Theseus", created in 1950, was a mechanical mouse controlled by an electromechanical relay circuit that enabled it to move around a labyrinth of 25 squares.^[101] The maze configuration was flexible and it could be modified arbitrarily by rearranging movable partitions.^[101] The mouse was designed to search through the corridors until it found the target. Having travelled through the maze, the mouse could then be placed anywhere it had been before, and because of its prior experience it could go directly to the target. If placed in unfamiliar territory, it was programmed to search until it reached a known location and then it would proceed to the target, adding the new knowledge to its memory and learning new behavior.^[101] Shannon's mouse appears to have been the first artificial learning device of its kind.^[101]

Shannon's estimate for the complexity of chess

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In 1949 Shannon completed a paper (published in March 1950) which estimates the game-tree complexity of chess, which is approximately 10¹²⁰. This number is now often referred to as the "Shannon number", and is still regarded today as an accurate estimate of the game's complexity. The number is often cited as one of the barriers to solving the game of chess using an exhaustive analysis (i.e. brute force analysis).^[102]^[103]

Shannon's computer chess program

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On March 9, 1949, Shannon presented a paper called "Programming a Computer for playing Chess". The paper was presented at the National Institute for Radio Engineers Convention in New York. He described how to program a computer to play chess based on position scoring and move selection. He proposed basic strategies for restricting the number of possibilities to be considered in a game of chess. In March 1950 it was published in Philosophical Magazine, and is considered one of the first articles published on the topic of programming a computer for playing chess, and using a computer to solve the game.^[102]^[104] In 1950, Shannon wrote an article titled "A Chess-Playing Machine",^[105] which was published in Scientific American. Both papers have had immense influence and laid the foundations for future chess programs.^[27]^[28]

His 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. 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. Material was counted according to the usual chess piece relative value (1 point for a pawn, 3 points for a knight or bishop, 5 points for a rook, and 9 points for a queen).^[106] He considered some positional factors, subtracting ½ point for each doubled pawn, backward pawn, and isolated pawn; mobility was incorporated by adding 0.1 point for each legal move available.

Shannon's maxim

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Shannon formulated a version of Kerckhoffs' principle as "The enemy knows the system". In this form it is known as "Shannon's maxim".

Miscellaneous

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Shannon also contributed to combinatorics and detection theory.^[107] His 1948 paper introduced many tools used in combinatorics. He did work on detection theory in 1944, with his work being one of the earliest expositions of the “matched filter” principle.^[107]

He was known as a successful investor who gave lectures on investing. A report from Barron's on August 11, 1986, detailed the recent performance of 1,026 mutual funds, and Shannon achieved a higher return than 1,025 of them. Comparing the portfolio of Shannon from the late 1950s to 1986, to Warren Buffett's of 1965 to 1995, Shannon had a return of about 28% percent, compared to 27% for Buffett.^[108] One such method of Shannon's was labeled 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.^[109] Shannon reportedly long thought of publishing about investing, but ultimately did not, despite giving multiple lectures.^[109] He 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.^[109]

Commemorations

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Shannon centenary

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This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (April 2016)

The Shannon centenary, 2016, marked the life and influence of Claude Elwood Shannon on the hundredth anniversary of his birth on April 30, 1916. It was inspired in part by the Alan Turing Year. An ad hoc committee of the IEEE Information Theory Society including Christina Fragouli, Rüdiger Urbanke, Michelle Effros, Lav Varshney and Sergio Verdú,^[110] coordinated worldwide events. The initiative was announced in the History Panel at the 2015 IEEE Information Theory Workshop Jerusalem^[111]^[112] and the IEEE Information Theory Society newsletter.^[113]

A detailed listing of confirmed events was available on the website of the IEEE Information Theory Society.^[114]

Some of the activities included:

Bell Labs hosted the First Shannon Conference on the Future of the Information Age on April 28–29, 2016, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to celebrate Claude Shannon and the continued impact of his legacy on society. The event includes keynote speeches by global luminaries and visionaries of the information age who will explore the impact of information theory on society and our digital future, informal recollections, and leading technical presentations on subsequent related work in other areas such as bioinformatics, economic systems, and social networks. There is also a student competition
Bell Labs launched a Web exhibit on April 30, 2016, chronicling Shannon's hiring at Bell Labs (under an NDRC contract with US Government), his subsequent work there from 1942 through 1957, and details of Mathematics Department. The exhibit also displayed bios of colleagues and managers during his tenure, as well as original versions of some of the technical memoranda which subsequently became well known in published form.
The Republic of Macedonia issued a commemorative stamp.^[115] A USPS commemorative stamp is being proposed, with an active petition.^[116]
A documentary on Claude Shannon and on the impact of information theory, The Bit Player, was produced by Sergio Verdú and Mark Levinson.^[117]
A trans-Atlantic celebration of both George Boole's bicentenary and Claude Shannon's centenary that is being led by University College Cork and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A first event was a workshop in Cork, When Boole Meets Shannon,^[118] and will continue with exhibits at the Boston Museum of Science and at the MIT Museum.^[119]
Many organizations around the world are holding observance events, including the Boston Museum of Science, the Heinz-Nixdorf Museum, the Institute for Advanced Study, Technische Universität Berlin, University of South Australia (UniSA), Unicamp (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), University of Toronto, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Cairo University, Telecom ParisTech, National Technical University of Athens, Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, University of Maryland, University of Illinois at Chicago, École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University of California Los Angeles, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A logo that appears on this page was crowdsourced on Crowdspring.^[120]
The Math Encounters presentation of May 4, 2016, at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, titled Saving Face: Information Tricks for Love and Life, focused on Shannon's work in information theory. A video recording and other material are available.^[121]

Awards and honors list

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The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973.^[122]^[123]

Alfred Noble Prize of the American Society of Civil Engineers, 1939
Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, 1955^[124]
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1957^[125]
Harvey Prize, the Technion of Haifa, Israel, 1972^[126]
Alfred Noble Prize, 1939 (award of civil engineering societies in the US)^[127]
National Medal of Science, 1966, presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson^[128]
Kyoto Prize, 1985^[129]
Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize of the Institute of Radio Engineers, 1949^[130]
United States National Academy of Sciences, 1956^[131]
Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1966^[132]
Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, 1967^[133]
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), foreign member, 1975^[134]
Member of the American Philosophical Society, 1983^[135]
Member of the Royal Irish Academy, 1985^[136]
Basic Research Award, Eduard Rhein Foundation, Germany, 1991^[137]
Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award, 2000^[138]
Donnor Professor of Science, MIT, 1958–1979^[139]

Selected works

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Claude E. Shannon: A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, master's thesis, MIT, 1937.
Claude E. Shannon: "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, 1948 (abstract).
Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver: The Mathematical Theory of Communication. The University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1949. ISBN 0-252-72548-4
Neil Sloane editor (1993) Claude Shannon: Collected Works, IEEE Press

See also

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References

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^ ^a ^b Atmar, Wirt (2001). "A Profoundly Repeated Pattern". Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. 82 (3): 208–211. ISSN 0012-9623. JSTOR 20168572.
^ ^a ^b ^c Tse, David (December 22, 2020). "How Claude Shannon Invented the Future". Quanta. Retrieved September 28, 2023.
^ ^a ^b ^c Roberts, Siobhan (April 30, 2016). "The Forgotten Father of the Information Age". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved September 28, 2023.
^ ^a ^b Slater, Robert (1989). Portraits in Silicon. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 37–38. ISBN 978-0-262-69131-4.
^ ^a ^b ^c James, Ioan (2009). "Claude Elwood Shannon, 30 April 1916 – 24 February 2001". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 55: 257–265. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2009.0015.
^ ^a ^b Horgan, John (April 27, 2016). "Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved September 28, 2023.
^ ^a ^b Brooks, Rodney (January 25, 2022). "How Claude Shannon Helped Kick-start Machine Learning". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved October 31, 2023.
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^ ^a ^b Poundstone, William (2005). Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street. Hill & Wang. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-8090-4599-0.
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^ Shimeall, Timothy J.; Spring, Jonathan M. (2013). Introduction to Information Security: A Strategic-Based Approach. Syngress. p. 167. ISBN 978-1597499699.
^ ^a ^b Koç, Çetin Kaya; Özdemir, Funda (2023). "Development of Cryptography since Shannon" (PDF). Handbook of Formal Analysis and Verification in Cryptography: 1–56. doi:10.1201/9781003090052-1. ISBN 978-1-003-09005-2.
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^ ^a ^b ^c Poundstone 2005, pp. 15–16
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^ ^a ^b ^c Klein, Daniel (2019). Dragoon, aLICE (ed.). "Mighty mouse". MIT News (January/February). Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Technology Review: 6–7.
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^ Advertisement: Minivac 601. October 1961. p. 33.
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^ William Poundstone (2010). Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System. Macmillan. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-374-70708-8. Shannon described himself as an atheist and was outwardly apolitical.
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Further reading

[edit]

Rethnakaran Pulikkoonattu — Eric W. Weisstein: Mathworld biography of Shannon, Claude Elwood (1916–2001) Shannon, Claude Elwood (1916–2001) – from Eric Weisstein's World of Scientific Biography
Claude E. Shannon: Programming a Computer for Playing Chess, Philosophical Magazine, Ser.7, Vol. 41, No. 314, March 1950. (Available online under External links below)
David Levy: Computer Gamesmanship: Elements of Intelligent Game Design, Simon & Schuster, 1983. ISBN 0-671-49532-1
Mindell, David A., "Automation's Finest Hour: Bell Labs and Automatic Control in World War II", IEEE Control Systems, December 1995, pp. 72–80.
Poundstone, William, Fortune's Formula, Hill & Wang, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8090-4599-0
Gleick, James, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, Pantheon, 2011, ISBN 978-0-375-42372-7
Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, Simon and Schuster, 2017, ISBN 978-1476766683
Nahin, Paul J., The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age, Princeton University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0691151007
Everett M. Rogers, Claude Shannon's Cryptography Research During World War II and the Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1994 Proceedings of IEEE International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology, pp. 1–5, 1994. Claude Shannon's cryptography research during World War II and the mathematical theory of communication

External links

[edit]

Media related to Claude Shannon at Wikimedia Commons

Wikiquote has quotations related to Claude Elwood Shannon.

IEEE Medal of Honor

1951–1975

v t e Timelines of computing
Computing	Before 1950 1950–1979 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s Scientific Women in computing
Computer science	Algorithms Artificial intelligence Binary prefixes Cryptography Machine learning Quantum computing and communication
Software	Free and open-source software Hypertext technology Operating systems DOS family Windows Linux Programming languages Virtualization development Malware
Internet	Internet conflicts Web browsers Web search engines
Notable people	Kathleen Antonelli John Vincent Atanasoff Charles Babbage John Backus Jean Bartik George Boole Vint Cerf John Cocke Stephen Cook Edsger W. Dijkstra J. Presper Eckert Adele Goldstine Lois Haibt Betty Holberton Margaret Hamilton Grace Hopper David A. Huffman Bob Kahn Brian Kernighan Andrew Koenig Semyon Korsakov Nancy Leveson Ada Lovelace Donald Knuth Joseph Kruskal Douglas McIlroy Marlyn Meltzer John von Neumann Klára Dán von Neumann Dennis Ritchie Guido van Rossum Claude Shannon Frances Spence Bjarne Stroustrup Ruth Teitelbaum Ken Thompson Linus Torvalds Alan Turing Paul Vixie Larry Wall Stephen Wolfram Niklaus Wirth Steve Wozniak Konrad Zuse

Claude E. Shannon Award

United States National Medal of Science laureates

Behavioral and social science

1960s	1964 Neal Elgar Miller
1980s	1986 Herbert A. Simon 1987 Anne Anastasi George J. Stigler 1988 Milton Friedman
1990s	1990 Leonid Hurwicz Patrick Suppes 1991 George A. Miller 1992 Eleanor J. Gibson 1994 Robert K. Merton 1995 Roger N. Shepard 1996 Paul Samuelson 1997 William K. Estes 1998 William Julius Wilson 1999 Robert M. Solow
2000s	2000 Gary Becker 2003 R. Duncan Luce 2004 Kenneth Arrow 2005 Gordon H. Bower 2008 Michael I. Posner 2009 Mortimer Mishkin
2010s	2011 Anne Treisman 2014 Robert Axelrod 2015 Albert Bandura
2020s	2023 Huda Akil Shelley E. Taylor 2025 Larry Bartels

Biological sciences

1960s	1963 C. B. van Niel 1964 Theodosius Dobzhansky Marshall W. Nirenberg 1965 Francis P. Rous George G. Simpson Donald D. Van Slyke 1966 Edward F. Knipling Fritz Albert Lipmann William C. Rose Sewall Wright 1967 Kenneth S. Cole Harry F. Harlow Michael Heidelberger Alfred H. Sturtevant 1968 Horace Barker Bernard B. Brodie Detlev W. Bronk Jay Lush Burrhus Frederic Skinner 1969 Robert Huebner Ernst Mayr
1970s	1970 Barbara McClintock Albert B. Sabin 1973 Daniel I. Arnon Earl W. Sutherland Jr. 1974 Britton Chance Erwin Chargaff James V. Neel James Augustine Shannon 1975 Hallowell Davis Paul Gyorgy Sterling B. Hendricks Orville Alvin Vogel 1976 Roger Guillemin Keith Roberts Porter Efraim Racker E. O. Wilson 1979 Robert H. Burris Elizabeth C. Crosby Arthur Kornberg Severo Ochoa Earl Reece Stadtman George Ledyard Stebbins Paul Alfred Weiss
1980s	1981 Philip Handler 1982 Seymour Benzer Glenn W. Burton Mildred Cohn 1983 Howard L. Bachrach Paul Berg Wendell L. Roelofs Berta Scharrer 1986 Stanley Cohen Donald A. Henderson Vernon B. Mountcastle George Emil Palade Joan A. Steitz 1987 Michael E. DeBakey Theodor O. Diener Harry Eagle Har Gobind Khorana Rita Levi-Montalcini 1988 Michael S. Brown Stanley Norman Cohen Joseph L. Goldstein Maurice R. Hilleman Eric R. Kandel Rosalyn Sussman Yalow 1989 Katherine Esau Viktor Hamburger Philip Leder Joshua Lederberg Roger W. Sperry Harland G. Wood
1990s	1990 Baruj Benacerraf Herbert W. Boyer Daniel E. Koshland Jr. Edward B. Lewis David G. Nathan E. Donnall Thomas 1991 Mary Ellen Avery G. Evelyn Hutchinson Elvin A. Kabat Robert W. Kates Salvador Luria Paul A. Marks Folke K. Skoog Paul C. Zamecnik 1992 Maxine Singer Howard Martin Temin 1993 Daniel Nathans Salome G. Waelsch 1994 Thomas Eisner Elizabeth F. Neufeld 1995 Alexander Rich 1996 Ruth Patrick 1997 James Watson Robert A. Weinberg 1998 Bruce Ames Janet Rowley 1999 David Baltimore Jared Diamond Lynn Margulis
2000s	2000 Nancy C. Andreasen Peter H. Raven Carl Woese 2001 Francisco J. Ayala George F. Bass Mario R. Capecchi Ann Graybiel Gene E. Likens Victor A. McKusick Harold Varmus 2002 James E. Darnell Evelyn M. Witkin 2003 J. Michael Bishop Solomon H. Snyder Charles Yanofsky 2004 Norman E. Borlaug Phillip A. Sharp Thomas E. Starzl 2005 Anthony Fauci Torsten N. Wiesel 2006 Rita R. Colwell Nina Fedoroff Lubert Stryer 2007 Robert J. Lefkowitz Bert W. O'Malley 2008 Francis S. Collins Elaine Fuchs J. Craig Venter 2009 Susan L. Lindquist Stanley B. Prusiner
2010s	2010 Ralph L. Brinster Rudolf Jaenisch 2011 Lucy Shapiro Leroy Hood Sallie Chisholm 2012 May Berenbaum Bruce Alberts 2013 Rakesh K. Jain 2014 Stanley Falkow Mary-Claire King Simon Levin
2020s	2023 Gebisa Ejeta Eve Marder Gregory Petsko Sheldon Weinbaum 2025 Bonnie Bassler Angela Belcher Helen Blau Emery N. Brown G. David Tilman Teresa Woodruff

Chemistry

1960s	1964 Roger Adams
1980s	1982 F. Albert Cotton Gilbert Stork 1983 Roald Hoffmann George C. Pimentel Richard N. Zare 1986 Harry B. Gray Yuan Tseh Lee Carl S. Marvel Frank H. Westheimer 1987 William S. Johnson Walter H. Stockmayer Max Tishler 1988 William O. Baker Konrad E. Bloch Elias J. Corey 1989 Richard B. Bernstein Melvin Calvin Rudolph A. Marcus Harden M. McConnell
1990s	1990 Elkan Blout Karl Folkers John D. Roberts 1991 Ronald Breslow Gertrude B. Elion Dudley R. Herschbach Glenn T. Seaborg 1992 Howard E. Simmons Jr. 1993 Donald J. Cram Norman Hackerman 1994 George S. Hammond 1995 Thomas Cech Isabella L. Karle 1996 Norman Davidson 1997 Darleane C. Hoffman Harold S. Johnston 1998 John W. Cahn George M. Whitesides 1999 Stuart A. Rice John Ross Susan Solomon
2000s	2000 John D. Baldeschwieler Ralph F. Hirschmann 2001 Ernest R. Davidson Gábor A. Somorjai 2002 John I. Brauman 2004 Stephen J. Lippard 2005 Tobin J. Marks 2006 Marvin H. Caruthers Peter B. Dervan 2007 Mostafa A. El-Sayed 2008 Joanna Fowler JoAnne Stubbe 2009 Stephen J. Benkovic Marye Anne Fox
2010s	2010 Jacqueline K. Barton Peter J. Stang 2011 Allen J. Bard M. Frederick Hawthorne 2012 Judith P. Klinman Jerrold Meinwald 2013 Geraldine L. Richmond 2014 A. Paul Alivisatos 2025 R. Lawrence Edwards

Engineering sciences

1960s	1962 Theodore von Kármán 1963 Vannevar Bush John Robinson Pierce 1964 Charles S. Draper Othmar H. Ammann 1965 Hugh L. Dryden Clarence L. Johnson Warren K. Lewis 1966 Claude E. Shannon 1967 Edwin H. Land Igor I. Sikorsky 1968 J. Presper Eckert Nathan M. Newmark 1969 Jack St. Clair Kilby
1970s	1970 George E. Mueller 1973 Harold E. Edgerton Richard T. Whitcomb 1974 Rudolf Kompfner Ralph Brazelton Peck Abel Wolman 1975 Manson Benedict William Hayward Pickering Frederick E. Terman Wernher von Braun 1976 Morris Cohen Peter C. Goldmark Erwin Wilhelm Müller 1979 Emmett N. Leith Raymond D. Mindlin Robert N. Noyce Earl R. Parker Simon Ramo
1980s	1982 Edward H. Heinemann Donald L. Katz 1983 Bill Hewlett George Low John G. Trump 1986 Hans Wolfgang Liepmann Tung-Yen Lin Bernard M. Oliver 1987 Robert Byron Bird H. Bolton Seed Ernst Weber 1988 Daniel C. Drucker Willis M. Hawkins George W. Housner 1989 Harry George Drickamer Herbert E. Grier
1990s	1990 Mildred Dresselhaus Nick Holonyak Jr. 1991 George H. Heilmeier Luna B. Leopold H. Guyford Stever 1992 Calvin F. Quate John Roy Whinnery 1993 Alfred Y. Cho 1994 Ray W. Clough 1995 Hermann A. Haus 1996 James L. Flanagan C. Kumar N. Patel 1998 Eli Ruckenstein 1999 Kenneth N. Stevens
2000s	2000 Yuan-Cheng B. Fung 2001 Andreas Acrivos 2002 Leo Beranek 2003 John M. Prausnitz 2004 Edwin N. Lightfoot 2005 Jan D. Achenbach 2006 Robert S. Langer 2007 David J. Wineland 2008 Rudolf E. Kálmán 2009 Amnon Yariv
2010s	2010 Shu Chien 2011 John B. Goodenough 2012 Thomas Kailath
2020s	2023 Subra Suresh 2025 John Dabiri

Mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences

1960s	1963 Norbert Wiener 1964 Solomon Lefschetz H. Marston Morse 1965 Oscar Zariski 1966 John Milnor 1967 Paul Cohen 1968 Jerzy Neyman 1969 William Feller
1970s	1970 Richard Brauer 1973 John Tukey 1974 Kurt Gödel 1975 John W. Backus Shiing-Shen Chern George Dantzig 1976 Kurt Otto Friedrichs Hassler Whitney 1979 Joseph L. Doob Donald E. Knuth
1980s	1982 Marshall H. Stone 1983 Herman Goldstine Isadore Singer 1986 Peter Lax Antoni Zygmund 1987 Raoul Bott Michael Freedman 1988 Ralph E. Gomory Joseph B. Keller 1989 Samuel Karlin Saunders Mac Lane Donald C. Spencer
1990s	1990 George F. Carrier Stephen Cole Kleene John McCarthy 1991 Alberto Calderón 1992 Allen Newell 1993 Martin David Kruskal 1994 John Cocke 1995 Louis Nirenberg 1996 Richard Karp Stephen Smale 1997 Shing-Tung Yau 1998 Cathleen Synge Morawetz 1999 Felix Browder Ronald R. Coifman
2000s	2000 John Griggs Thompson Karen Uhlenbeck 2001 Calyampudi R. Rao Elias M. Stein 2002 James G. Glimm 2003 Carl R. de Boor 2004 Dennis P. Sullivan 2005 Bradley Efron 2006 Hyman Bass 2007 Leonard Kleinrock Andrew J. Viterbi 2009 David B. Mumford
2010s	2010 Richard A. Tapia S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan 2011 Solomon W. Golomb Barry Mazur 2012 Alexandre Chorin David Blackwell 2013 Michael Artin
2020s	2025 Ingrid Daubechies Cynthia Dwork

Physical sciences

1960s	1963 Luis W. Alvarez 1964 Julian Schwinger Harold Urey Robert Burns Woodward 1965 John Bardeen Peter Debye Leon M. Lederman William Rubey 1966 Jacob Bjerknes Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Henry Eyring John H. Van Vleck Vladimir K. Zworykin 1967 Jesse Beams Francis Birch Gregory Breit Louis Hammett George Kistiakowsky 1968 Paul Bartlett Herbert Friedman Lars Onsager Eugene Wigner 1969 Herbert C. Brown Wolfgang Panofsky
1970s	1970 Robert H. Dicke Allan R. Sandage John C. Slater John A. Wheeler Saul Winstein 1973 Carl Djerassi Maurice Ewing Arie Jan Haagen-Smit Vladimir Haensel Frederick Seitz Robert Rathbun Wilson 1974 Nicolaas Bloembergen Paul Flory William Alfred Fowler Linus Carl Pauling Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer 1975 Hans A. Bethe Joseph O. Hirschfelder Lewis Sarett Edgar Bright Wilson Chien-Shiung Wu 1976 Samuel Goudsmit Herbert S. Gutowsky Frederick Rossini Verner Suomi Henry Taube George Uhlenbeck 1979 Richard P. Feynman Herman Mark Edward M. Purcell John Sinfelt Lyman Spitzer Victor F. Weisskopf
1980s	1982 Philip W. Anderson Yoichiro Nambu Edward Teller Charles H. Townes 1983 E. Margaret Burbidge Maurice Goldhaber Helmut Landsberg Walter Munk Frederick Reines Bruno B. Rossi J. Robert Schrieffer 1986 Solomon J. Buchsbaum H. Richard Crane Herman Feshbach Robert Hofstadter Chen-Ning Yang 1987 Philip Abelson Walter Elsasser Paul C. Lauterbur George Pake James A. Van Allen 1988 D. Allan Bromley Paul Ching-Wu Chu Walter Kohn Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. Jack Steinberger 1989 Arnold O. Beckman Eugene Parker Robert Sharp Henry Stommel
1990s	1990 Allan M. Cormack Edwin M. McMillan Robert Pound Roger Revelle 1991 Arthur L. Schawlow Ed Stone Steven Weinberg 1992 Eugene M. Shoemaker 1993 Val Fitch Vera Rubin 1994 Albert Overhauser Frank Press 1995 Hans Dehmelt Peter Goldreich 1996 Wallace S. Broecker 1997 Marshall Rosenbluth Martin Schwarzschild George Wetherill 1998 Don L. Anderson John N. Bahcall 1999 James Cronin Leo Kadanoff
2000s	2000 Willis E. Lamb Jeremiah P. Ostriker Gilbert F. White 2001 Marvin L. Cohen Raymond Davis Jr. Charles Keeling 2002 Richard Garwin W. Jason Morgan Edward Witten 2003 G. Brent Dalrymple Riccardo Giacconi 2004 Robert N. Clayton 2005 Ralph A. Alpher Lonnie Thompson 2006 Daniel Kleppner 2007 Fay Ajzenberg-Selove Charles P. Slichter 2008 Berni Alder James E. Gunn 2009 Yakir Aharonov Esther M. Conwell Warren M. Washington
2010s	2011 Sidney Drell Sandra Faber Sylvester James Gates 2012 Burton Richter Sean C. Solomon 2014 Shirley Ann Jackson
2020s	2023 Barry Barish Myriam Sarachik 2025 Richard Alley Wendy Freedman Keivan Stassun

Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 1991

Fellows

Foreign

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