Claude Shannon, The Father of the Information Age, Would be 100 Today

[LongTomH]

The Google Doodle for today, April 30, honors the eccentric mathematician, engineer, inventor and juggler.



The New Yorker mag has a wonderful article by Siobhan Roberts honoring Shannon: Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100:

Twelve years ago, Robert McEliece, a mathematician and engineer at Caltech, won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest honor in the field of information theory. During his acceptance lecture, at an international symposium in Chicago, he discussed the prize’s namesake, who died in 2001. Someday, McEliece imagined, many millennia in the future, the hundred-and-sixty-sixth edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica—a fictional compendium first conceived by Isaac Asimov—would contain the following biographical note:

Claude Shannon: Born on the planet Earth (Sol III) in the year 1916 A.D. Generally regarded as the father of the information age, he formulated the notion of channel capacity in 1948 A.D. Within several decades, mathematicians and engineers had devised practical ways to communicate reliably at data rates within one per cent of the Shannon limit.

As is sometimes the case with encyclopedias, the crisply worded entry didn’t quite do justice to its subject’s legacy. That humdrum phrase—“channel capacity”—refers to the maximum rate at which data can travel through a given medium without losing integrity. The Shannon limit, as it came to be known, is different for telephone wires than for fibre-optic cables, and, like absolute zero or the speed of light, it is devilishly hard to reach in the real world. But providing a means to compute this limit was perhaps the lesser of Shannon’s great breakthroughs. First and foremost, he introduced the notion that information could be quantified at all. In “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” his legendary paper from 1948, Shannon proposed that data should be measured in bits—discrete values of zero or one. (He gave credit for the word’s invention to his colleague John Tukey, at what was then Bell Telephone Laboratories, who coined it as a contraction of the phrase “binary digit.”)

“It would be cheesy to compare him to Einstein,” James Gleick, the author of “The Information,” told me, before submitting to temptation. “Einstein looms large, and rightly so. But we’re not living in the relativity age, we’re living in the information age. It’s Shannon whose fingerprints are on every electronic device we own, every computer screen we gaze into, every means of digital communication. He’s one of these people who so transform the world that, after the transformation, the old world is forgotten.” That old world, Gleick said, treated information as “vague and unimportant,” as something to be relegated to “an information desk at the library.” The new world, Shannon’s world, exalted information; information was everywhere. “He created a whole field from scratch, from the brow of Zeus,” David Forney, an electrical engineer and adjunct professor at M.I.T., said. Almost immediately, the bit became a sensation: scientists tried to measure birdsong with bits, and human speech, and nerve impulses. (In 1956, Shannon wrote a disapproving editorial about this phenomenon, called “The Bandwagon.”)

You'll find articles honoring Shannon all over the web today:

Fortune Magazine: Google Celebrates 100th Birthday of Claude Shannon, The Inventor of the Bit

Time Magazine: Google Doodle Honors Mathematician-Juggler Claude Shannon

Hollywood Life: Claude Shannon: Google Marks 100th Birthday of Mathematician - 5 Things to Know: