Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon ( born April 30, 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, † February 24, 2001 in Medford, Massachusetts ) was an American mathematician and electrical engineer. He is considered the founder of information theory.
Life
Shannon grew up in Petoskey, Michigan, on which is often given as a birthplace. His father was a businessman, his mother a language teacher of German origin. During his high school, he worked as a messenger for Western Union.
He followed his sister Catherine in 1932 to the University of Michigan. She graduated in the same year a mathematics degree from, and he began studying electrical engineering and mathematics. In 1936, he moved with a degree in mathematics and electrical engineering at MIT. In his thesis for Master in Electrical Engineering ( 1937), A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, he used Boolean algebra to the design of digital circuits. The work was created from the analysis of relay circuits in analogue computers Differential Analyzer of Vannevar Bush ( Dean of Engineering at MIT ), the Shannon programmed for users. In 1940 he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics with a dissertation on theoretical genetics (An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics) at MIT.
After a short stay as a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he came in 1941 as a mathematician to the likewise located in New Jersey AT & T Bell Labs.
After he had begun in 1956 as a visiting professor at MIT, he joined in 1958 quite there, as Donner Professor of Science. In 1978 he became Professor Emeritus at MIT. His professional relationship with Bell Labs as a consultant he held during which until 1972. During his last years he suffered from Alzheimer 's disease, in consequence of which he died.
Work
In 1948, he published his seminal work A Mathematical Theory of Communication (German Mathematical foundations of information theory ). In this essay, he focused on the problem under which conditions a restored from a transmitter coded and transmitted through a noisy communication channel information at the destination, so it can be decoded without loss of information. He was able to show surprising relations between the mathematically defined and the information known from physics concept of entropy.
At the same time he published the article Communication in the presence of noise ( " messaging in the presence of background noise"), in which he the appearance frequency- limited functions by the Cardinal series by John Macnaghten Whittaker ( 1929 and 1935) with considerations on the maximum data rate, especially by Harry Nyquist, linked to a theory of channel capacity in digital signal transmission. In front of him, but without his knowledge, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kotelnikov published 1933, same tenor result. Accordingly, the sampling frequency must (sampling rate) at least twice as large for a signal as the highest frequency contained in it to be reconstructed into an analog signal without loss of information ( Nyquist -Shannon sampling theorem ).
Another remarkable article appeared in 1949, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, in the Shannon clarified the formal foundations of cryptography and she rose to the rank order of an independent science.
Shannon was interested in many things and creative; According to an anecdote he was seen at Bell in the Night juggling riding around on a unicycle in the aisles. Edge products to his professional activities include a juggling machine, rocket-powered Frisbees, motorized pogo sticks, a machine for reading minds, a mechanical mouse (Shambhala, 1950), which was made based off Relay circuits in labyrinths using a simple memory, and already in the 1960s, an early chess computer. A work from 1950 already deals with chess programs. The work was influential and led to the first game of chess on computers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos in 1956. He also built the "ultimate machine", a box with a switch, the mechanical hand back to "off" turned after him had turned on. According to him, the unity of the information content of a message, Shannon was named.
The mid-1960s he began to be interested in financial transactions and held over several times at MIT well-attended lectures (one of his students was Paul Samuelson ). He suggested one today Constant Proportion Portfolio rebalanced method called to make a profit from random fluctuations of the market ( after each transaction allocation of capital into exactly two halves, one for speculation, the other cash reserves).
After the division of AT & T in 1996, the majority of Bell Labs was the new Lucent Technologies slammed. The Research Laboratory of AT & T in Florham Park, New Jersey, was christened in his honor AT & T Shannon Laboratory.
Among his research results in the field of Boolean algebras include the inversion rate and the development of Shannon's Theorem.
Honors
In 1966 he received the National Medal of Science. In 1985 he was awarded the first ever time Kyoto Prize.