Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, educator, engineer and writer. Shannon is considered by many to be the father of the information sciences.
Background
Claude Elwood Shannon was born on April 30, 1916, in Gaylord, Michigan, United States. He was the son of Claude Elwood Shannon and Mabel Catherine (Wolf) Shannon. Shannon's father was a judge at Gaylord, while his mother was the principal of the high school in Gaylord. Shannon's grandfather was an inventor and a farmer.
Education
Shannon graduated from Gaylord High School in 1932. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan in 1936. He then went on to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied both electrical engineering and mathematics, receiving a master’s degree and a doctorate in 1940. For his master’s degree in electrical engineering, he applied George Boole’s logical algebra to the problem of electrical switching. For his doctor's dissertation, Shannon applied mathematics to genetics.
He received a great number of honorary doctorates from such educational institutions as Yale University, the University of Michigan, Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, the University of Oxford, the University of East Anglia, Carnegie Mellon University, Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Shannon spent a year at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study as a National research fellow. In 1941 he joined Bell Laboratories (now Nokia Bell Labs) as a research mathematician, and he spent most of World War II working in a top-secret section of the laboratories on cryptanalysis and anti-aircraft gun directors. It was there that he met Alan Turing, the leader of the British team that was designing one of the first computers to crack Germany’s secret codes. Turing was thrilled to meet Shannon, because they had both independently conceived of logical machines.
In the late forties and early fifties, Shannon designed programs for chess-playing machines and a maze-running mechanical mouse, and in 1956 he helped John McCarthy organize the very first conference on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth College. But his greatest contribution was a series of papers he wrote that established the field of information science—the theoretical and mathematical basis for the mechanical conveyance of information. Shannon presented a set of theorems that were directly related to the economical and efficient transmission of messages on noisy media, and indirectly but still fundamentally related to the connection between energy and information. These theorems, endlessly elaborated and refined by engineers making color televisions, running telephone systems, establishing radio networks, and proliferating various types of computers, had a tremendous impact on the late twentieth-century.
In addition to his work at Bell Laboratories, Shannon spent many years teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a visiting professor of electrical communication in 1956, and then in 1957 he was named professor of communications sciences and mathematics. He was the Donner Professor of Science from 1958 to 1978, when he retired. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Shannon first applied Boolean algebra to electrical systems, laying the groundwork for both the computer industry and telecommunications.
Later that same decade he formulated a sweeping theory explaining the communication of information. By distinguishing between meaning and information and reconceptualizing information as all of the possible messages in a communication, Shannon was able to quantify information for the first time. This made it possible to analyze mathematically various communication technologies.
Besides Shannon's theory of communication, he published a classic paper "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits." This paper point out the identity between the two "truth values" of symbolic logic and the binary values 1 and 0 of electronic circuits. Shannon showed how a "logic machine" could be built using switching circuits corresponding to the propositions of Boolean algebra.
Shannon was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society of London, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Leopoldina Academy, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Irish Academy, the Tau Beta Pi, the Sigma Xi and the Phi Kappa Phi.
Connections
Shannon married Mary Elizabeth Moore on March 27, 1949. They had three children together - Robert James, Andrew Moore and Margarita Catherine.