Shannon, Claude Elwood (1916–2001)

US mathematician who founded the science of information theory. He argued that entropy is equivalent to a shortage of information content (a degree of uncertainty), and obtained a quantitative measure of the amount of information in a given message.

Shannon reduced the notion of information to a series of yes/no choices, which could be presented by a binary code. Each choice, or piece of information, he called a ‘bit’. In this way, complex information could be organized according to strict mathematical principles. He also wrote the first effective program for a chess-playing computer.

His book The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) was written with US mathematician Warren Weaver.

Shannon was born in Gaylord, Michigan, and studied at the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1941 he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, but he also held academic positions at MIT from 1956, and in 1958 he left Bell to become professor of science.

As early as 1938 Shannon began examining the question of a mathematical approach to language. His methods, although devised in the context of engineering and technology, were soon seen to have applications not only to computer design but to virtually every subject in which language was important, such as linguistics, psychology, cryptography, and phonetics; further applications were possible in any area where the transmission of information in any form was important.