CLAUDE E. SHANNON

Claude E. Shannon is considered the father of information theory. His work in communication theory created the basis for the development of computers and the internet as we know them today. He showed that a message could be encoded into electrical signals, which he called BITs or Binary digITs in his 1948 papers, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication."

His codes included just enough information to ensure that the message traveled from the sender to the receiver and arrived intact. These codes were designed with enough redundancy to be certain that even if there were some interference, or "noise," in the channel, the message, when decoded at the other end of the channel, was the same as when it had left the sender.

The scientific community applauded Shannon’s theory of communication and its related "second theorem" as one of the major intellectual discoveries of the time.¹ His work applied not only to the field of communication but to many other disciplines. Klaus Krippendorff states: "The model is applicable not only to mediated communication (e.g., telephone, newsprint, computers) but also to the flow of orders through a chain of command, to the sequential analysis of data in the course of a scientific experiment, or to information processing within an organism."²

Many believe that Claude Shannon should have received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to Information Theory, but his work didn’t fall into any one of its six categories!³

1. Campbell, J. (1982). Grammatical an: Information, entropy, language, and life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
2. Krippendorff, K. (1986). Information theory: Structural models for qualitative data. Sage Publications: Beverly Hill, CA.
3. Katterman, L. (2001). Claude E. Shannon: Communication theory pioneer created the theoretical basis for digital computers, the internet, and much more. Retrieved March 6, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.research.umich.edu/research/news/michigangreats/shannon.html.