Claude E(lwood) Shannon - Biography, Shannon miscellany, Awards and honors list
Mathematician and pioneer of communication theory, born in Gaylord, Michigan, USA. He studied at Michigan and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1938 published a seminal paper on the application of symbolic logic to relay circuits, which helped transform circuit design from an art into a science. He worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (194172) in the area of information theory, and wrote The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) with Warren Weaver.
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), an American electrical engineer and mathematician, has been called "the father of information theory", and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory.
Biography
Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan.
Boolean theory
In 1932 he entered the University of Michigan, where he took a course that introduced him to the works of George Boole.
While studying the complicated ad hoc circuits of the differential analyzer, Shannon saw that Boole's concepts could be used to great utility. It also earned Shannon the Alfred Noble American Institute of American Engineers Award in 1940. Howard Gardner, of Harvard University, called Shannon's thesis "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century".
In this work, Shannon proved that Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic could be used to simplify the arrangement of the electromechanical relays then used in telephone routing switches, then turned the concept upside down and also proved that it should be possible to use arrangements of relays to solve Boolean algebra problems. Shannon's work became the foundation of practical digital circuit design when it became widely known among the electrical engineering community during and after World War II. The theoretical rigor of Shannon's work completely replaced the ad hoc methods that had previously prevailed.
Flush with this success, Vannevar Bush suggested that Shannon work on his dissertation at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, funded by the Carnegie Institution headed by Bush, to develop similar mathematical relationships for Mendelian genetics, which resulted in Shannon's 1940 PhD thesis at MIT, An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.
Wartime research
Shannon then joined Bell Labs 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). Blackman, Hendrik Wade Bode, and Claude Shannon, formally introduced the problem of Fire Control as a special case of transmission, manipulation and utilization of intelligence, in other words it modeled the problem in terms of Data and Signal Processing and thus heralded the coming of the information age. Shannon was greatly influenced by this work.
Postwar contributions
In 1948 Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication article in two parts in the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal. Shannon developed information entropy as a measure for the uncertainty in a message while essentially inventing what became known as the dominant form of "information theory." The book, co-authored with Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, reprints Shannon's 1948 article and Weaver's popularization of it, which is accessible to the non-specialist. Shannon's concepts were also popularized, subject to his own proofreading, in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise.
Another notable paper published in 1949 is Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, a major contribution to the development of a mathematical theory of cryptography where he also proved that all theoretically unbreakable ciphers must have the same requirements as the one-time pad.
Hobbies and Inventions
Outside of his academic pursuits, Shannon was interested in juggling, unicycling, and chess.
Legacy and tributes
Shannon came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1956 to join its faculty and to conduct work in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). To commemorate his achievements, there were celebrations of his work in 2001, and there are currently five statues of Shannon: one at the University of Michigan; After the breakup of the Bell system, the part of Bell Labs that remained with AT&T was named Shannon Labs in his honor.
Robert Gallager has called Shannon the greatest scientist of the 20th century. 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 1948 publication: "He's one of the great men of the century.
However, Shannon was oblivious to the marvels of the digital revolution because his mind was ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.
Shannon miscellany
Shannon's computer chess program
In 1950 Shannon published a groundbreaking paper on computer chess entitled Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. 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. Quoting from the paper:
The evaluation function is clearly for illustrative purposes, as Shannon stated.
The reason for assigning checkmate a value higher than the maximum sum of all other terms is so that the minimax procedure will value checkmate above all else and thus it will sacrifice as much material as it has to in order to prevent itself from being checkmated, or to checkmate the opponent.
The Las Vegas connection: Information theory and its applications to game theory
Shannon and his wife Betty also used to go on weekends to Las Vegas with M.I.T. Shannon and Thorp also applied the same theory, later known as the Kelly criterion, to the stock market with even better results.
Shannon's Maxim
Shannon formulated a version of Kerckhoffs' principle as "the enemy knows the system".
User Comments Add a comment…