Now, were you to be asked who some of the great minds of the twentieth and twenty-first century, there would without a doubt be the typical rolodex of names that have become canonized and repeated.
Yet, society fails to realize that with each telling, it gains more hindsight, and thus more bias in the weight it gives to the accomplishments of a few at the cost of a whole.
Which makes sense from a marketing stand point. Better to have a few memorable names to tie industries to so there will always be a conversational reference point. But this system, though it allows for efficiency through the use of symbolism, fails to capture some of the more unique spirits that drove change on a societal level.
And I use that slightly unnecessary eloquence as a preface in the first of a series of profiles we hope to provide of the great men and women of history whose accomplishments were revolutionary but who’s names remain unknown. And today we begin with one of our personal favorites, a great man of science, knowing full and well and that when you first see his name in the title of this piece your first question to yourself will be, “Who is Claude Shannon?”
And to those who know the answer to that question, well played.
For those of you not familiar, however, Claude Shannon was an American mathematician whose contribution to our society can be concisely stated in one non-hyperbolic sentence:
He created a blueprint for the digital age.
In 1936, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the age of 22, Shannon began working in the laboratory of computer pioneer Vannevar Bush and was made responsible for one of the first computers, and at the time potentially the most powerful computer created, the Differential Analyzer. The Analyzer was an analog computer made up of a complex system of pulleys, gears, and rods, a system that depended on arranging the mechanical levers in order to allow the machine to compute mathematical equations.
What intrigued Shannon about the machine however was the way in which the open and closed circuits and relay operations they set in motion resembled the binary true-false choice in logic. He then went about attempting to apply two-value binary algebra (0 and 1) and symbolic logic originally conceived of by the mathematician George Boole could be replace the difficulty of having to set the system manually each time a computation was needed. And with this simple idea, Claude Shannon would lay the philosophical foundations of the modern computer a decade before they existed.
His dissertation, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” is considered without comparison, the most important important master’s thesis of the twentieth century.
Did I mention he was only 22?
However, though Mr. Shannon could have done nothing else in his career and still been canonized by the scientific community, he would instead revolutionize society further while working at Bell Labs, when in 1948, he would write a paper on the communication of digital information that would lay, almost literally, the foundation for the digital age.
The paper, titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication, was written by Mr. Shannon at the elder age of 32, and in it he defined in measurable mathematical terms what ‘digital information’ was and how it can be transmitted in the face of noise or distortion. Shannon’s process is still difficult to fathom given that there was literally no precedent to his thought process. His conception of information was that media — in any form — could be written and encoded into a universal language of binary digits (a concept which harkens back to Shannon’s Master’s previous paper at M.I.T.) and thus transmitted without distortion.
He would term this fundamental unit of digital information as the bit, a phrase the shy mathematician credited to Bell Labs colleague, regardless of the fact that his paper was the first ever to use the word in print. The beauty of Shannon’s idea lay in its unification of different communication mediums as essentially the same, that if there were two sources, with one message being sent and received, then binary digits would represent it.
Moreover, he demonstrated, perfect transmission would be possible no matter how much static and distortion there might be in the communication channel, and no matter how faint the signal might be. Thus, given the speed of the message (in bits) and the maximum potential of the transmission channel, the encoded binary digits could send a perfect message from one source to another using data compression and error-correcting redundancies (basically adding in extra binary digits should part of the message not go through). Shannon’s work had exponential consequences, as it was the seed for measuring information movement, which allowed for creating the building blocks for the smallest unit in a computer, which then opened up a pathway for information storage, which would then blossom into the technological advances that have brought us to the digital century we are in now.
In today’s world, literally, almost all modern communication engineering is based on this simple conception that Shannon referred to as the fundamental theorem of information.”
And, so, the next time there is a conversation or tallying of the greatest minds of not only the twentieth century, but of the technology equivalent of Mount Rushmore, let us not forget that Shannon’s work, if not his name, is right alongside the name’s Einstein and Jobs.
It is self to see that the Father of Information Theory is also the Father of the Digital Age and the Father of the Computer. A statement that’s if viewed with a little bit humor, we can see that one man with two ideas (the theoretical structure that defined both computing & nature of digital information movement) provided the intellectual leap that brought the world into the technology era. It is simply, in the face of the canonizing and hero worship in today’s society of businessmen and start-up founders, to give credit to a man his whole life too humble to demand recognition where it was obviously due.