Shannon, Claude Elwood

▪ 2002

      American mathematician and computer scientist (b. April 30, 1916, Petoskey, Mich.—d. Feb. 24, 2001, Medford, Mass.), laid the theoretical foundations for modern mass communications and came to be regarded as the “father of the information age.” After graduating from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1936, he earned (1940) both a master's degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He joined the mathematics department at Bell Labs in 1941, where he contributed to work on antiaircraft missile control systems. He remained affiliated with Bell Labs until 1972. Shannon became a visiting professor at MIT in 1956, a permanent member of the faculty in 1958, and professor emeritus in 1978. Shannon's master's thesis, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” (1940), used Boolean algebra to establish the theoretical underpinnings of digital circuits, which became fundamental to the operation of modern computers and telecommunications equipment. In 1948 Shannon published a paper entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which established basic tenets of information theory and contained the first published use of the term bit to designate a single binary digit. His formulation of information theory was an immediate success with communications engineers and continued to prove useful to later researchers. It also inspired many attempts to apply information theory in other areas, such as cognition, biology, linguistics, psychology, economics, and physics. Aside from producing many provocative and influential articles on information theory, cryptography, and chess-playing computers, Shannon also designed various mechanical devices, including an electromechanical mouse—one of the first experiments in artificial intelligence.

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