March 2, 2001

8:00 AM

The passing of a giant.Claude Shannon has died. He was a man of towering intellect, whose achievements are dwarfed only by the ignorance of the public to the value of those achievements. All our lives have been radically changed by him, but I bet not one person in a hundred has even heard of him.
posted by Steven Den Beste (4 comments total)

In The CodeBreakers, David Kahn has this to say:

It is called "information theory" or, sometimes, a "mathematical theory of communication." It deals in general with the mathematical laws that govern systems designed to communicate information. Originating in transmission problems of telephony and telegraphy, it has grown to embrace virtually all information-processing devices, from standard communications systems to electronic computers and servomechanisms, and even the nerve networks of animals and men. Its ideas have proven so suggestive that they have been adapted to such fields as psychology, linguistics, molecular genetics, history, statistics, and neurophysiology. ... The brilliant mind that fathered it also sired its cryptologic applications.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 8:01 AM on March 2, 2001

anyone who accesses anything online owes a splash of their 40 oz. for claude shannon. he being the shannon of Shannon's Law,
C= W log2 (1 + S/N)
The mathematical theory of communication which relates channel information carrying capacity as a function of signal-to-noise across the usable bandwidth

woo-hoo!! i know who he is. i am one in a hundred. sad day indeed.
posted by donkeysuck at 10:58 AM on March 2, 2001

An interesting man, Claude Shannon saw tings from a different angle than most folks.
posted by bjgeiger at 4:00 PM on March 2, 2001

I found out about Claude Shannon a couple years ago through The Shannonizer. I was looking for a nonsense-from-text generating program to replace an old one called "Babble" I had for DOS.
posted by frenetic at 8:39 PM on March 2, 2001