Abstract
Claude Shannon was born one hundred years ago. This essay is a salute to his genius.
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- 1.
In his book: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. (The World as Will and Representation, Tr. R.B. Haldane).
- 2.
Civilization, a personal view, Penguin Books, 1969, p. 105.
- 3.
The quotation is from an interview: Anthony Liversidge, “Profile of Claude Shannon,” Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers, edited by N. J. A. Sloan, Aaron D. Wyner (IEEE, 1993).
- 4.
His source is found in the work of J. M. Whittaker from the middle 1930s.
- 5.
“Claude E. Shannon: A retrospective on his life, work and impact.” IEEE Trans. Info. Th., 47, 2001.
- 6.
Bell System Tech J., 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, 1948.
- 7.
Found in a footnote to “The idea factory: the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation,” The Penguin Press, 2012, by Jon Gertner.
- 8.
The Logician and the Engineer How George Boole and Claude Shannon created the information age. Princeton University Press, 2013.
- 9.
“Communication theory of secrecy systems,” BSTJ, 1949.
- 10.
See Sergei N. Molotkov, “Quantum cryptography” and V.A.’s one-time key and sampling theorems.
- 11.
The mouse was called Theseus, a name borrowed appropriately from Greek mythology.
- 12.
One of the earliest scientific journals, founded by Alexander Tulloch in 1797.
- 13.
In 1965 Shannon met the then world chess champion M.M. Botvinnik at a conference in Moscow. Botvinnik had been three times world-champion and was a pioneer of computerized chess-playing programs. Information about this meeting seems hard to come by, but it is known that they discussed chess and its computerization. More can be found it Botvinnik’s book: Computers, chess and long-range planning, Heidelberg Science Library, 1970, Springer, Translator’s preface.
- 14.
“Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE, 37, 1949, pp. 10–21.
- 15.
B.M. Oliver, J.R. Pierce and C.E. Shannon, “The Philosophy of PCM,” Proc. IRE, 36, 1948, pp. 1324–1331.
Acknowledgements
The present essay has been helpfully informed in several places by articles in Wikipedia. The author takes pleasure in thanking Maurice Dodson, Paulo Ferreira, David A. Gustafson, and Gerhard Schmeisser for their help, and my wife Nancy for her constant support.
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Higgins, J.R. (2020). Claude Shannon: American Genius. In: Casey, S., Okoudjou, K., Robinson, M., Sadler, B. (eds) Sampling: Theory and Applications. Applied and Numerical Harmonic Analysis. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36291-1_1
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