Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916 in a hospital near Petoskey, Michigan. His family lived in the small town of Gaylord where he spent most of his first sixteen years. He attended public school and graduated from Gaylord High School in 1932. The young boy showed an early inclination toward mechanical and electrical things. Science and mathematics were his best subjects at school. At home he constructed models of planes and built a radio-controlled model boat. He even installed a barbed-wire telegraph system to a friend's house half a mile away. While growing up he worked as a messenger for the Western Union company. His childhood hero was Thomas Edison whom he later learned was a distant cousin. Both men were descendants of John Ogden who died in 1682.
Shannon entered the University of Michigan in 1932 where he encountered the work of George Boole. He graduated in 1936 with two bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics. That same year he began graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer which was an early analog computer composed of electromechanical parts. Shannon designed switching circuits based on Boole's concepts while studying the complicated ad hoc circuits of this machine. In 1937 he wrote his master thesis titled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits. A paper from this thesis appeared in print in 1938. The revolutionary work diagramed switching circuits that could implement essential operators of Boolean algebra. He proved these circuits could simplify arrangements of electromechanical relays used during telephone call routing switches. Shannon expanded this concept to show these circuits could solve all problems Boolean algebra could solve. The last chapter presented diagrams of several circuits including a digital four-bit full adder. Howard Gardner hailed the thesis as possibly the most important master thesis of the century in 1987. Herman Goldstine described it in 1972 as surely one of the most important master theses ever written.
Shannon returned to Bell Labs to work on fire-control systems and cryptography during World War II under a contract with section D-2 of the National Defense Research Committee. For two months early in 1943 he came into contact with Alan Turing who had been posted to Washington. Turing shared methods used by the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to break cyphers used by Kriegsmarine U-boats. They met at teatime in the cafeteria where Turing showed Shannon his 1936 paper defining what is now known as the universal Turing machine. This impressed Shannon because many ideas complemented his own. Shannon and his team developed anti-aircraft systems that tracked enemy missiles and planes while determining paths for intercepting them. In 1945 as the war neared its end the NDRC issued a summary of technical reports. Inside the volume on fire control a special essay titled Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems appeared. It was coauthored by Ralph Beebe Blackman and Hendrik Wade Bode along with Shannon. The paper formally treated smoothing data in fire-control by analogy with separating signal from interfering noise in communications systems. At the close of the war Shannon prepared a classified memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography dated September 1945.
In 1948 the promised memorandum appeared as A Mathematical Theory of Communication in two parts within July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal. This work focused on how best to encode messages a sender wants to transmit. Shannon developed information entropy as a measure of information content in a message which measures uncertainty reduced by the message. He essentially invented the field of information theory. Warren Weaver popularized these concepts in a book reprinting Shannon's article. Weaver pointed out that the word information in communication theory is not related to what you say but to what you could say. Information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when selecting a message. John Robinson Pierce further popularized Shannon's concepts in his book Symbols Signals and Noise subject to Shannon's own proofreading. In May 1951 Mervin Kelly received a request from CIA director Walter Bedell Smith regarding Shannon. Shannon became part of the CIA Special Cryptologic Advisory Group or SCAG. His influence has been immense in the field where he was author or coauthor of twelve of forty-nine papers cited in a 1973 collection.
In 1950 Shannon designed and built a learning machine named Theseus with help from his wife Betty. It consisted of a maze on a surface through which a mechanical mouse could move. Below the surface were sensors an electromechanical relay circuit following the path of the mechanical mouse. The mouse searched through corridors until it found the target. Having traveled through the maze the mouse could then be placed anywhere before and go directly to the target due to prior experience. If placed in unfamiliar territory it was programmed to search until reaching a known location then proceed to the target adding new knowledge to memory. After much trial and error this device learned the shortest path through the maze. Mazin Gilbert stated that Theseus inspired the whole field of AI since random trial and error is its foundation. Shannon wrote multiple influential papers on artificial intelligence including his 1950 paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. He also published Computers and Automata in 1953 alongside John McCarthy who co-edited a book titled Automata Studies published in 1956. Shannon co-organized and participated in the Dartmouth workshop of 1956 alongside John McCarthy Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester.
Outside academic pursuits Shannon was interested in juggling unicycling and chess. He invented many devices including a Roman numeral computer called THROBAC and juggling machines. He built a device capable of solving the Rubik's Cube puzzle. Shannon also invented flame-throwing trumpets and rocket-powered frisbees. He created plastic foam shoes for navigating a lake which made him appear to walk on water to observers. Shannon designed the Minivac 601 digital computer trainer sold by Scientific Development Corp starting in 1961. He is considered co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O. Thorp. The device improved odds when playing roulette. Shannon was known as a successful investor who gave lectures on investing. A report from Barron's on the 11th of August 1986 detailed performance of 1,026 mutual funds where Shannon achieved higher return than 1,025 of them. Comparing his portfolio from late 1950s to 1986 to Warren Buffett's 1965 to 1995 Shannon had about 28 percent return compared to 27 percent for Buffett. One method labeled Shannon's demon formed portfolios of equal parts cash and stock rebalancing regularly.
There are six statues of Shannon sculpted by Eugene Daub located at University of Michigan MIT Gaylord Michigan UC San Diego Bell Labs and AT&T Shannon Labs. The statue in Gaylord sits within Claude Shannon Memorial Park. After breakup of the Bell System part remaining with AT&T Corporation was named Shannon Labs in his honor. In June 1954 Shannon was listed among top twenty most important scientists in America by Fortune magazine. Information theory appeared as one of top ten revolutionary scientific theories by Science News in 2013. On the 30th of April 2016 Shannon received a Google Doodle celebrating what would have been his hundredth birthday. A feature film titled The Bit Player directed by Mark Levinson premiered at World Science Festival in 2019. It drew from interviews conducted with Shannon in his house during 1980s before release on Amazon Prime in August 2020. The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor and he became its first recipient in 1973. He also won National Medal of Science presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 and Kyoto Prize in 1985.
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Common questions
When and where was Claude Shannon born?
Claude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916 in a hospital near Petoskey, Michigan. He spent most of his first sixteen years living in the small town of Gaylord.
What did Claude Shannon study at the University of Michigan and MIT?
Claude Shannon graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936 with two bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics. He began graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936 to work on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer.
How did Claude Shannon contribute to information theory during World War II?
Claude Shannon worked on fire-control systems and cryptography for Bell Labs under a contract with section D-2 of the National Defense Research Committee. In September 1945 he prepared a classified memorandum titled A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography which later became the foundation of modern information theory.
What inventions did Claude Shannon create outside of academic research?
Claude Shannon invented many devices including a Roman numeral computer called THROBAC, juggling machines, and a device capable of solving the Rubik's Cube puzzle. He also designed the Minivac 601 digital computer trainer sold by Scientific Development Corp starting in 1961.
When was Claude Shannon honored with a Google Doodle and what other awards did he receive?
On the 30th of April 2016 Claude Shannon received a Google Doodle celebrating what would have been his hundredth birthday. He won the National Medal of Science presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 and the Kyoto Prize in 1985.