April 30, 2009, 12:46 pm
Happy Birthday, Dad of Info Theory
By Lisa Agustin
Per Wired, on this date in 1916, Claude Elwood Shannon, the father of information theory and the man who coined the term “bit,” was born:
Shannon’s 1938 master’s thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, used Boolean algebra to establish the theoretical basis of modern digital circuits. The paper came out of Shannon’s insight that the binary nature of Boolean logic was analogous to the ones and zeros used by digital circuits.
His paper was widely cited, laying the foundations for modern information theory. It has been called “one of the most significant master’s theses of the 20th century.” Not bad for a 22-year-old kid from a small town in Michigan.
