The following is the obituary/eulogy that the NY Times wrote today regarding 
the death of Claude Shannon. If you read it, you'll see how much his ideas 
affect every aspect of your current lives.

I have never believed in the indispensibility of individuals, particularly 
scientists. The truth is there to be discovered, and like all truths, it's 
patient. There's almost an irrelevancy to who actually gets to a new truth 
first. Climate and culture are undoubtedly more important than the names of 
the individuals involved. If Einstein or Newton or Darwin or Shannon had 
never lived, we would still know pretty much everything we know now.

Nonetheless, Shannon ranked with Einstein and Newton and Darwin, and that's 
no small thing.

Wirt Atmar


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February 27, 2001 

Claude Shannon, Mathematician, Dies at 84

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Dr. Claude Elwood Shannon, the American mathematician and computer scientist 
whose theories laid the groundwork for the electronic communications networks 
that now lace the earth, died on Saturday in Medford, Mass., after a long 
fight with Alzheimer's disease. He was 84.

Understanding, before almost anyone, the power that springs from encoding 
information in a simple language of 1's and 0's, Dr. Shannon as a young man 
wrote two papers that remain monuments in the fields of computer science and 
information theory.

"Shannon was the person who saw that the binary digit was the fundamental 
element in all of communication," said Dr. Robert G. Gallager, a professor of 
electrical engineering who worked with Dr. Shannon at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology. "That was really his discovery, and from it the 
whole communications revolution has sprung."

Dr. Shannon's later work on chess- playing machines and an electronic mouse 
that could run a maze helped create the field of artificial intelligence, the 
effort to make machines that think. And his ability to combine abstract 
thinking with a practical approach — he had a penchant for building machines 
— inspired a generation of computer scientists.

Dr. Marvin Minsky of M.I.T., who as a young theorist worked closely with Dr. 
Shannon, was struck by his enthusiasm and enterprise. "Whatever came up, he 
engaged it with joy, and he attacked it with some surprising resource — which 
might be some new kind of technical concept or a hammer and saw with some 
scraps of wood," Dr. Minsky said. "For him, the harder a problem might seem, 
the better the chance to find something new." 

Born in Petoskey, Mich., on April 30, 1916, Claude Elwood Shannon got a 
bachelor's degree in mathematics and electrical engineering from the 
University of Michigan in 1936. He got both a master's degree in electrical 
engineering and his Ph.D. in mathematics from M.I.T. in 1940.

While at M.I.T., he worked with Dr. Vannevar Bush on one of the early 
calculating machines, the "differential analyzer," which used a precisely 
honed system of shafts, gears, wheels and disks to solve equations in 
calculus.

Though analog computers like this turned out to be little more than footnotes 
in the history of the computer, Dr. Shannon quickly made his mark with 
digital electronics, a considerably more influential idea. 

In what has been described as one of the most important master's theses ever 
written, he showed how Boolean logic, in which problems can be solved by 
manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0, could be carried out automatically 
with electrical switching circuits. The symbol 1 could be represented by a 
switch that was turned on; 0 would be a switch that was turned off.

The thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," was 
largely motivated by the telephone industry's need to find a mathematical 
language to describe the behavior of the increasingly complex switching 
circuits that were replacing human operators. But the implications of the 
paper were far more broad, laying out a basic idea on which all modern 
computers are built.

George Boole, the 19th-century British mathematician who invented the 
two-symbol logic, grandiosely called his system "The Laws of Thought." The 
idea was not lost on Dr. Shannon, who realized early on that, as he once put 
it, a computer is "a lot more than an adding machine." The binary digits 
could be used to represent words, sounds, images — perhaps even ideas.

The year after graduating from M.I.T., Dr. Shannon took a job at AT&T Bell 
Laboratories in New Jersey, where he became known for keeping to himself by 
day and riding his unicycle down the halls at night.

"Many of us brought our lunches to work and played mathematical blackboard 
games," said a former colleague, Dr. David Slepian. "Claude rarely came. He 
worked with his door closed, mostly. But if you went in, he would be very 
patient and help you along. He could grasp a problem in zero time. He really 
was quite a genius. He's the only person I know whom I'd apply that word to."

In 1948, Dr. Shannon published his masterpiece, "A Mathematical Theory of 
Communication," giving birth to the science called information theory. The 
motivation again was practical: how to transmit messages while keeping them 
from becoming garbled by noise.

To analyze this problem properly, he realized, he had to come up with a 
precise definition of information, a dauntingly slippery concept. The 
information content of a message, he proposed, has nothing to do with its 
content but simply with the number of 1's and 0's that it takes to transmit 
it.

This was a jarring notion to a generation of engineers who were accustomed to 
thinking of communication in terms of sending electromagnetic waveforms down 
a wire. "Nobody had come close to this idea before," Dr. Gallager said. "This 
was not something somebody else would have done for a very long time."

The overarching lesson was that the nature of the message did not matter — it 
could be numbers, words, music, video. Ultimately it was all just 1's and 0's.

Today, when gigabytes of movie trailers, Napster files and e-mail messages 
course through the same wires as telephone calls, the idea seems almost 
elemental. But it has its roots in Dr. Shannon's paper, which may contain the 
first published occurrence of the word "bit."

Dr. Shannon also showed that if enough extra bits were added to a message, to 
help correct for errors, it could tunnel through the noisiest channel, 
arriving unscathed at the end. This insight has been developed over the 
decades into sophisticated error-correction codes that ensure the integrity 
of the data on which society interacts.

In later years, his ideas spread beyond the fields of communications 
engineering and computer science, taking root in cryptography, the 
mathematics of probability and even investment theory. In biology, it has 
become second nature to think of DNA replication and hormonal signaling in 
terms of information.

And more than one English graduate student has written papers trying to apply 
information theory to literature — the kind of phenomenon that later caused 
Dr. Shannon to complain of what he called a "bandwagon effect."

"Information theory has perhaps ballooned to an importance beyond its actual 
accomplishments," he lamented. 

After he moved to M.I.T. in 1958, and beyond his retirement two decades 
later, he pursued a diversity of interests — a mathematical theory of 
juggling, an analog computer programmed to beat roulette, a system for 
playing the stock market using probability theory.

He is survived by his wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore Shannon; a son, Andrew Moore 
Shannon; a daughter, Margarita Shannon; a sister, Catherine S. Kay; and two 
granddaughters.

In the last years of his life, Alzheimer's disease began to set in. 
"Something inside him was getting lost," Dr. Minsky said. "Yet none of us 
miss him the way you'd expect — for the image of that great stream of ideas 
still persists in everyone his mind ever touched."


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