“develop these results … in a forthcoming memorandum on the transmission of information.”
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Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American polymath who was a mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor known as the "father of information theory", and the man who laid the foundations of the Information Age.
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science · American mathematician (1916–2001) · mathematician · cryptographer · computer scientist · inventor · university teacher · engineer · geneticist · also Claude Shannon, Claude E. Shannon, C. E. Shannon, Shannon, C.E. Shannon, C E Shannon
Born 30 April 1916 · Died 24 February 2001 · Q92760
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2026· 1 entry
2016· 2 entries
Chronicling Shannon's hiring at Bell Labs (under an NDRC contract with US Government), his subsequent work there from 1942 through 1957, and details of Mathematics Department
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Shannon was honored with a Google Doodle to celebrate his life on what would have been his 100th birthday
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2013· 1 entry
Information theory was listed as one of the top 10 revolutionary scientific theories by Science News
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2008· 1 entry
Published “Science and technology for water purification in the coming decades” in Nature — cited 7,862 times.
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2005· 1 entry
Published “Three Approaches to Qualitative Content Analysis” in Qualitative Health Research — cited 34,067 times.
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2004· 1 entry
Awarded National Inventors Hall of Fame (2004).
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2003· 1 entry
Published “Cytoscape: A Software Environment for Integrated Models of Biomolecular Interaction Networks” in Genome Research — cited 45,908 times.
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2001· 2 entries
Died 2001-02-24.
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Survived by his wife, a son and daughter, and two granddaughters
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2000· 1 entry
Awarded Marconi Prize (2000).
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1993· 1 entry
The perspective introduced by Shannon's communication theory (now called "information theory") is the foundation of the digital revolution, and every device containing a microprocessor or microcontroller is a conceptual
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1991· 1 entry
Awarded Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1991).
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1987· 1 entry
Howard Gardner hailed Shannon's thesis "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century
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1986· 1 entry
Detailed the recent performance of 1,026 mutual funds, and Shannon achieved a higher return than 1,025 of them
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1985· 1 entry
Awarded Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences (1985).
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1983· 1 entry
Won John Fritz Medal (1983).
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1978· 1 entry
Awarded Harold Pender Award (1978).
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1976· 1 entry
Published “Revised effective ionic radii and systematic studies of interatomic distances in halides and chalcogenides” in Acta Crystallographica Section A — cited 61,095 times.
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1973· 1 entry
Awarded Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award (1973).
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1972· 2 entries
Awarded Harvey Prize (1972).
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Awarded Claude E. Shannon Award (1972).
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1969· 1 entry
Published “Effective ionic radii in oxides and fluorides” in Acta Crystallographica Section B Structural Crystallography and Crystal Chemistry — cited 7,801 times.
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1966· 2 entries
Won National Medal of Science (1966).
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Won IEEE Medal of Honor (1966).
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1963· 1 entry
Awarded Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship (1963).
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1956· 3 entries
Wrote a one-page editorial for the "IRE Transactions on Information Theory" entitled "The Bandwagon" which he began by observing: "Information theory has, in the last few years, become something of a scientific bandwa
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Regarding coding for a noisy channel, which also became a classic paper in the field of information theory
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Shannon joined the MIT faculty, holding an endowed chair
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1955· 1 entry
Won Stuart Ballantine Medal (1955).
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1951· 1 entry
In his article "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", showing upper and lower bounds of entropy on the statistics of English – giving a statistical foundation to language analysis
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1950· 3 entries
Shannon designed and built, with the help of his wife, Betty, a learning machine named Theseus
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“Programming a Computer for Playing Chess”
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Shannon wrote an article titled "A Chess-Playing Machine", which was published in Scientific American
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1949· 5 entries
Awarded IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award (1949).
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Shannon presented a paper called "Programming a Computer for playing Chess"
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Shannon completed a paper (published in March 1950) which estimates the game-tree complexity of chess, which is approximately 10120
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As "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in the Bell System Technical Journal
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Is "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", a declassified version of his wartime work on the mathematical theory of cryptography, in which he proved that all theoretically unbreakable cyphers must have the same requir
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1948· 4 entries
Published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in Bell System Technical Journal — cited 53,460 times.
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The promised memorandum appeared as "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", an article in two parts in the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal
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Is still regarded as the most important post-1948 contributor to the theory
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Published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in Bell System Technical Journal — cited 9,657 times.
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1945· 1 entry
As the war was coming to an end, the NDRC was issuing a summary of technical reports as a last step prior to its eventual closing down
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1944· 1 entry
With his work being one of the earliest expositions of the “matched filter” principle
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1943· 1 entry
Shannon came into contact with the leading British mathematician Alan Turing
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1940· 3 entries
Shannon became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey
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Studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1936–1940).
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With a PhD in mathematics; his thesis, which focused on genetics, contained important results though it remained unpublished and relatively unknown until recently
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1939· 1 entry
Awarded Noble Prize (1939).
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1937· 1 entry
Wrote his master's degree thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, with a paper from this thesis published in 1938
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1936· 3 entries
With two bachelor's degrees: one in electrical engineering and the other in mathematics
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Shannon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, which was an early analog computer that was compo
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Studied at University of Michigan (1932–1936).
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1932· 2 entries
Shannon entered the University of Michigan, where he was introduced to the work of George Boole
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Studied at Gaylord High School (1932).
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1916· 1 entry
Born 1916-04-30.
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