Author: Stuart Cracraft
Date: 05:09:48 02/28/01
Claude Shannon dead at 84
Computer scientist invented binary code
MEDFORD, Mass., Feb. 27 — Claude Shannon, a mathematician and computer
scientist whose theories became the basis for modern mass communications
networks, died Saturday after battling Alzheimer’s disease. He was 84.
AT&T Fellow SHANNON ENVISIONED all communications in binary code — a
string of 1s and 0s — and understood that binary digits could be used to
represent words, sounds and images.
In 1948 he outlined a series of mathematical formulas to reduce
communication processes to binary code — known as “bits” — and calculated ways
to send the maximum number of bits through phone lines, or other modes of
communication.
It wasn’t until the invention of integrated circuits years later that his
formulas could be put to use. Now, they’re at the core of the commonplace
technology that delivers the Internet and its various trappings, from music, to
video, to e-mail, via a phone line. The theories are also the basis of the field
of information theory.
“He’s one of the great men of the century. Without him, none of the
things we know today would exist. The whole digital revolution started with
him,” Neil Sloane, an AT&T fellow who co-edited Shannon’s collected works, said
in Tuesday’s edition of The Star-Ledger of Newark.
Shannon was born in Michigan and received his bachelor’s degree in
mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, and his
doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. He joined the
faculty in 1958, and retired in 1978.
While most of his pioneering contributions were in mathematics, computing
and cryptography, Shannon was just as happy inventing for the sheer fun of it.
Some of his works included rocket-powered Frisbees, motorized pogo
sticks and a mechanical mouse-in-a-maze. There was also THROBAC-I, which
computed in Roman numerals. And nearly a half-century before Deep Blue beat
Russian master Garry Kasparov, Shannon described how to build a chess-playing
computer.
He worked at Bell Labs from 1941 through 1972. Shannon’s evening unicycle
rides — while juggling — through the company’s drab hallways are legendary.
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