OT: Missed this news on Feb 27
The great Claude Shannon died at 84.
Tuesday February 27 1:06 PM ET
Mathematician Claude Shannon Dies
MEDFORD, Mass. (AP) - Claude Shannon, a mathematician and computer scientist whose theories became the basis for modern mass communications networks, died Saturday after battling Alzheimer's disease (news - web sites). He was 84.
Shannon envisioned all communications in binary code - a string of 1s and 0s - and understood that binary digits could be used to represent words, sounds and images.
In 1948 he outlined a series of mathematical formulas to reduce communication processes to binary code - known as ``bits'' - and calculated ways to send the maximum number of bits through phone lines, or other modes of communication.
It wasn't until the invention of integrated circuits years later that his formulas could be put to use. Now, they're at the core of the commonplace technology that delivers the Internet and its various trappings, from music, to video, to e-mail, via a phone line. The theories are also the basis of the field of information theory.
``He's one of the great men of the century. Without him, none of the things we know today would exist. The whole digital revolution started with him,'' Neil Sloane, an AT&T fellow who co-edited Shannon's collected works, said in Tuesday's edition of The Star-Ledger of Newark.
Shannon was born in Michigan and received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, and his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) in 1940. He joined the faculty in 1958, and retired in 1978.
While most of his pioneering contributions were in mathematics, computing and cryptography, Shannon was just as happy inventing for the sheer fun of it.
Some of his works included rocket-powered Frisbees, motorized pogo sticks and a mechanical mouse-in-a-maze. There was also THROBAC-I, which computed in Roman numerals. And nearly a half-century before Deep Blue beat Russian master Garry Kasparov, Shannon described how to build a chess-playing computer.
He worked at Bell Labs from 1941 through 1972. Shannon's evening unicycle rides - while juggling - through the company's drab hallways are legendary. |
