Yesterday, Claude Shannon, perhaps the only graduate student in history to
change the world twice while he was still in school, died at the age of 84.

Shannon's master's thesis dealt with sampling theory and channel
communications bandwidth -- and more than a little bit of that work rides
with every image and sound file that you download off of the internet. But to
greatly top that work, Shannon more or less singlehandedly invented
information theory for his doctoral work. The profundity of that work simply
can't be exaggerated.

For more information, see:

      http://www.bell-labs.com/news/2001/february/26/1.html

Shannon later did work in artificial intelligence, machine learning and
cryptography. He was an extraordinary person who simply did extraordinary
things and thought extraordinary thoughts and made them simple.

Wirt Atmar