Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon was a mathematician and electrical engineer who is considered by many to be one of the founding fathers of the computing age, beginning with his influential M.I.T. master's thesis of 1938, followed by a decades-long, highly productive career in research at Bell Laboratories. During the war, he was funded additionally by the U. S. govenment to work on cryptography issues, culminating in a seminal paper, published in 1948, which arguably established a new area of study in engineering called information theory. Information theory was devoted to messages and signals and communications and computing.

An enormous amount of material exists about Shannon, both on the web and the deep web (i.e., for people who pay, or whose employers pay, such as academics). The material is largely in praise of Shannon's influence, not just on communications and computers, but also on thinking about biological processes and linguistics. This article will not attempt to create yet another biography of Claude Shannon, but it will provide pointers to multiple existing biographies which already describe his life in great detail. This article will try to outline his seminal accomplishments and provide pointers to additional reading on each topic.