Claude Shannon
American mathematician (1916–2001)
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Key Takeaways
- Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) 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.
- The roboticist Rodney Brooks declared Shannon the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies, and the mathematician Solomon W.
- At the University of Michigan, Shannon dual-degreed, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and another in mathematics, both in 1936.
- He graduated from MIT in 1940 with a PhD in mathematics; his thesis focusing on genetics contained important results, while initially going unpublished.
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) 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.
Shannon was the first to describe the use of Boolean algebra—essential to all digital electronic circuits—and helped found the field of artificial intelligence. The roboticist Rodney Brooks declared Shannon the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies, and the mathematician Solomon W. Golomb described his intellectual achievement as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century".
At the University of Michigan, Shannon dual-degreed, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and another in mathematics, both in 1936. As a 21-year-old master's degree student in electrical engineering at MIT, his 1937 thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", demonstrated that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship, thereby establishing the theory behind digital computing and digital circuits. Called by some the most important master's thesis of all time, it is the "birth certificate of the digital revolution", and started him in a lifetime of work that led him to win a Kyoto Prize in 1985. He graduated from MIT in 1940 with a PhD in mathematics; his thesis focusing on genetics contained important results, while initially going unpublished.
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