Claude Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916 to 2001) was an American mathematician and electrical engineer who founded the subject of information theory. Born in Gaylord, Michigan, he took degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering at the University of Michigan in 1936 and a doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. His master's thesis applied Boole's algebra to relay and switching circuits. He worked at Bell Laboratories from 1941 to 1972, and in 1948 he published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which proposed a linear model of a communications system, introduced the word bit and showed that extra bits allow transmission errors to be corrected. He later wrote on cryptography and on chess playing programs, joined the MIT faculty and became Donner Professor of Science, and received the National Medal of Science in 1966 and the Kyoto Prize in 1985.