Claude Shannon, known as the father of informationtheory, his ideas, theories and research laid the base of digital revolutionfrom wartime cryptography to modern cell phones from electromechanical relaysto the internet his ideas made them all possible. Shannon started his career asa mathematician at a young age of 18, T’s Bell Labs were looking for anefficient way of communication transmission.
At that time, telecommunications consisted oftelegraph’s radio telephones, which Shannon realized, any type of informationcould be taken and quantified by assigning a source rate measured in bits persecond. Shannon introduced this idea to the world in his 1943 paper, the mathematicaltheory of communication and that’s when the engineering world changed.In today’s world, communications with fiber cables andhigh speed wireless would be a disaster if Shannon’s theory was not considered,according to Shannon, there were limits realization, there is a relationshipbetween channel bandwidth and power noise to determine how fast a communicationcan take place. If you look at AT labs today, you would hardlyfind anything that doesn’t relate to Shannon’s theories.
Shannon began makinghis mark a decade ago as an MIT researcher. Shannon’s master’s thesis on BooleanAlgebra, which is kind of an abstract field, is considered as the mostinfluential master’s thesis and was conceived by a English Mathematician,George Boole and could be used to build electronic circuits. Claude Shannon was really the first one to makeconnection between security and information. He always contributed in guidingresearchers. As we saw in all his hobbies, Claude Shannon was articulate, withhis little hobbies and interests building a mechanical mouse and building ajuggling machine and riding his unicycle around the labs.Bell came with the technology called regenerativerepeater. The idea of using digital/ binary/ bits over Analog was originallyShannon’s and it changed the communication world.
They started out with a bitand regenerated same bit while laying the base for information theory, Shannon contributedone of the fundamental insights guiding researchers.The 1948 paper published in the Bell, System technicaljournal made Shannon a star overnight, his awards include the National Medal ofScience, Japan’s Kyoto Prize and the IEEE Medal of Honour, his biggest honouris in Florham Park New Jersey that the research labs here are named after Shannon.Claude Shannon was a scientist engineer foundingmember of the unicycling Society of America and the father of the informationage but his passing in 2001 did not leave the gaping hole in the world ofmathematics and engineering instead it left an open door to creativityinnovation and the possible and that is why Claude Shannon is not only a techicon but a hero of the digital revolution.