Short answers, pulled from the story.
Claude Shannon is best known for founding the field of information theory with his 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", published in the Bell System Technical Journal. He formally introduced the term "bit" as the fundamental unit of information and developed the concept of information entropy as a measure of uncertainty in a message.
Shannon's 1937 master's thesis at MIT, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", demonstrated that Boolean algebra could be implemented using electrical switches to construct any logical numerical relationship. It won the 1939 Alfred Noble Prize and has been called by historians possibly the most important master's thesis of the twentieth century, establishing the theoretical foundation of digital circuit design.
Shannon wrote a classified memorandum in September 1945 titled "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography", declassified and published in 1949 as "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems". In it he proved that the one-time pad is unbreakable and that any truly secure cipher must share its properties: a random key as large as the plaintext, never reused, and kept secret. His work is considered the founding document of modern cryptography.
Theseus was a learning machine Shannon designed and built in 1950, with help from his wife Betty. It consisted of a mechanical mouse moving through a maze, guided by an electromechanical relay circuit beneath the surface. The mouse learned the shortest path through the maze by trial and error and retained that knowledge for future runs. It is regarded as the first artificial learning device of its kind and is considered an early example of artificial intelligence.
Shannon co-organized the Dartmouth workshop in 1956, alongside John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Nathaniel Rochester. The event is considered the founding moment of the field of artificial intelligence. Shannon joined the MIT faculty that same year.
Shannon's honors include the Alfred Noble Prize in 1939, the National Medal of Science presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, the Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1966, the Kyoto Prize in 1985, and the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor, and he was its first recipient in 1973.