Claude Elwood Shannon：

was a graduate of the University of Michigan, being awarded a degree in mathematics and electrical engineering in 1936

Although he had not been outstanding in mathematics, he then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained a Master's Degree in electrical engineering and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1940.

Shannon wrote a Master's thesis A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits on the use of Boole's algebra to analyse and optimise relay switching circuits. His doctoral thesis was on population genetics.

published Mathematical theory of the differential analyzer in 1941

Shannon joined AT&T Bell Telephones in New Jersey in 1941 as a research mathematician and remained at the Bell Laboratories until 1972.

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication”

published in the Bell System Technical Journal (1948).

This paper founded the subject of information theory

he proposed a linear schematic model of a communications system.

Points:

Communication: requiring electromagnetic waves to be sent down a wire.

One could transmit pictures, words, sounds etc. by sending a stream of 1s and 0s down a wire

Considered a source of information which generates words composed of a finite number of symbols.

These are transmitted through a channel, with each symbol spending a finite time in the channel.

The problem involved statistics.

Gave a method of analysing a sequence of error terms in a signal to find their inherent variety, matching them to the designed variety of the control system.

Features:

Introduced the word "bit" (位元) for the first time

Shannon showed that adding extra bits to a signal allowed transmission errors to be corrected.

Results:

D Slepian, a colleague at the Bell Laboratories wrote:

Probably no single work in this century has more profoundly altered man's understanding of communication than C E Shannon's article, "A mathematical theory of communication", first published in 1948.

The ideas in Shannon's paper were soon picked up by communication engineers and mathematicians around the world.

They were elaborated upon, extended, and complemented with new related ideas.

The subject thrived and grew to become a well-rounded and exciting chapter in the annals of science.

Find out more at:

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/
Mathematicians/Shannon.html

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Shannon.html

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