In this tribute for Quanta Magazine, Stanford professor David Tse highlights the remarkable contributions of Claude Shannon.
Summing up Shannon’s foundational contribution to information theory, Tse writes: “in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.” Shannon “applied a mathematical discipline called Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits.” This was such an important development that it “is now considered to have been the starting point of digital circuit design.”
All our digital communication technologies can be traced back to Shannon’s work. For instance, consider:
“Another unexpected conclusion stemming from Shannon’s theory is that whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficient to encode it into bits before transmitting it. So in a radio system, for example, even though both the initial sound and the electromagnetic signal sent over the air are analog wave forms, Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave. This surprising result is a cornerstone of the modern digital information age, where the bit reigns supreme as the universal currency of information.”
Read the full article here.
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