Claude Shannon Does Not Have the Same

Claude Shannon does not have the same name recognition as Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Alexander Bell, Bill Gates, or Doyle Brunson, but his work had an impact that rivaled each of these famous men. Shannon was a mathematician, an electrical engineer, and a cryptographer is famous in his field as the father of information theory. However, he also helped usher in the modern computer age, and used his mathematical knowledge to make money in Vegas playing blackjack, things that make him relevant to a modern society obsessed with computers and with gambling. In other words, Claude Shannon was a cool scientist before much of America realized that scientists could be cool.

Shannon always had tremendous promise as a scientist, and he realized that promise early in life. He was born April 30, 1916, and he spent much of his young life focused on attaining an education. He had an early interest in math and science, and entered college in 1932. He graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees, one in electrical engineering and one in mathematics. By the age of 21, he was a master's student at MIT. It was during that time that he wrote a thesis on the electrical application of Boolean algebra. This application had an influence on digital computer and digital circuit design. It might even be that Shannon's application made the advent of personal computers possible. William Poundstone referred to Shannon's thesis as the most important master's thesis of all time, reiterating a similar statement made by Harvard University's Howard Gardner (2005). In fact, the engineering community, as a whole, seemed to regard Shannon's thesis as groundbreaking; he earned the Alfred Noble American Institute of American Engineers Award for it.

Shannon's early scientific success gave him an academic freedom unknown to most scientists. He worked in genetics, as well as beginning to develop information theory in the time before World War II. However, it was Shannon's work at Bell Labs during World War II that really contributed to his theoretical base. Shannon's official jobs at Bell Labs were to work on fire control systems and cryptography. This led to him having contact with Alan Turing, who was the leading British cryptanalyst. While working at Bell Labs, Shannon coauthored a paper on data and signal processing, which is how computers continue to communicate with one another. He also worked extensively on cryptography, and was able to name the characteristics of an unbreakable code system (Shannon, 1949).

Shannon's most significant contributions, or at least the ones that contributed to his label as the father of information theory, came after World War II. He examined the best method of encoding transmitted information, using probability theory. The memorandum discussing this work was the beginning of Shannon's development of information theory, and dealt with information entropy, among other items. Shannon demonstrated entropy "to be equivalent to a shortage in the information content in a message… Shannon proved that in a noisy conversation, signal could always be send without distortion. If the message is encoded in such a way that it is self-checking, signals will be received with the same accuracy as if there were no interference on the line" (Dougherty, unk.). This discovery was a breakthrough in cryptography. Shannon expanded upon this work by showing how treating whitespace or blanks as an additional letter in the alphabet could reduce uncertainty in written language. He worked on sampling theory, which was critical in allowing technology to move from analog to digital.