Claude Shannon
So, it’s little Stevie Jobs’ birthday today. Certainly he’s been influential in the world of digital computing. But when folks wax on and wax off about how great some of these more recent figures in computing have been, I like to remind them of some of the all-time greats. It just so happens that that today is also the 9th anniversary of the death of Claude Shannon. Who is Claude Shannon, you ask? How soon they forget, or perhaps they never knew.
Well, in his masters thesis at MIT in 1937, he observed that you could solve Boolean algebra problems using switching and relay circuits. OK, think about what that means. Wait for it…yes, he invented the modern digital computer. In 1937. In a masters thesis.
It was all downhill from there, of course. He only founded the field of Information Theory (central to cryptography, computational linguistics, and pretty much any kind of digital information processing). Yes, the digital revolution started with him.
Oh, and he also laid out the field of computer chess in 1950, describing the different ways a computer chess program could be designed. Sixty years later, his roadmap for the field has been dead on.
So, the next time someone celebrates Stevie’s birthday, let them know about Claude Elwood Shannon.
