Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon was born on 30 April 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, and died on 24 February 2001 in Medford, Massachusetts. His 1937 MIT master's thesis used Boolean algebra to show that electrical switching circuits could carry out logical operations, laying the theoretical groundwork for digital circuit design and later called one of the most consequential master's theses of the twentieth century. He earned a PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940 and worked as a research mathematician at Bell Labs from 1941 to 1972. In 1948 he published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell System Technical Journal, founding information theory: a mathematical framework for quantifying information itself, defining the bit as its basic unit and entropy as a measure of a message's uncertainty, and setting the theoretical limits on how far data can be compressed and how reliably it can be sent over a noisy channel. The framework and terminology of that single paper are still used essentially unchanged. Shannon later taught at MIT from 1957 to 1978.