Definition of Information
Year of Discovery: 1948
What Is It? Information can both follow all mathematical and physical laws
created to describe matter and act like physical matter.
Who Discovered It? Claude Shannon
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
Every time you surf the Net, download an article, print from your computer screen, use
a cell phone, rent a DVD, or listen to a CD, you do so because of Claude Shannon’s discovery. The whole digital revolution started with Claude Shannon’s discovery that information
can be turned into digital bits (single blocks) of information and treated like any physical
flow of matter.
Shannon made information physical. His discovery allowed physicists and engineers
to switch from analog to digital technologies and opened the door to the Information Age.
His 1948 article describing the digital nature of information has been called the Magna
Carta of the Information Age.
How Was It Discovered?
Claude Shannon was born in rural Michigan in 1916 and grew up with a knack for
electronics—turning long fences of barbed wire into his private telephone system, and earning money rebuilding radios. He studied for his doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His professors described him as brilliant, but not
terribly serious as a student, spending his time designing rocket-powered Frisbees and
juggling machines.
However, his 1938 master’s thesis (written as part of his studies) startled the world of
physics. In it Shannon described the perfect match between electronic switching circuits
and the mathematics of nineteenth-century British genius George Boole. Shannon showed
that a simple electronic circuit could carry out all of the operations of Boolean symbolic
logic. This was the first time anyone had showed that more than simple mathematics could
be embodied in electronic circuits. This student thesis opened the door to digital computers,
which followed a decade later.
After graduation Shannon was hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey.
Engineers there faced a problem: how to stuff more “information” into a noisy wire or microwave channel. They gave the job to Claude Shannon, even though he was best known for
riding a unicycle through the lab hallways.
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