Re: [TUHS] RIP Claude Shannon

Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal" book has probably been discussed on this list in the past. It has pages full of fascinating stuff about Claude Shannon & his work. For instance: "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" has just the kind of cerebral exuberance you'd expect from a very bright twenty-one-year-old. Shannon's thesis is downright fun to read--and strangely compelling, given what's happened in the six decades since it was written. ... That ability, in turn, is ultimately what makes a modern digital computer so much more than just an adding machine: it can work its way through a sequence of such decisions automatically. In a word, it can be programmed. And that's why "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" is arguably the most influential master's thesis of the twentieth century: in it Claude Shannon laid the theoretical foundation for all of modern computer design ... Legend has it that Claude Shannon published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948 only because his boss at Bell Labs finally badgered him into it. And whatever the truth of that story, the point is that no one who knew Shannon has any trouble believing it. "He wrote beautiful papers--when he wrote," says Robert Fano, who became a leader of MIT's information-theory group in the 1950s and still has a reverential photograph of Shannon hanging in his office. "And he gave beautiful talks- when he gave a talk. But he hated to do it." It wasn't a matter of Shannon's being lazy, Fano says; he was constantly filling up notebooks with ideas, theorems, and calculations. He just wouldn't publish--or not very often, anyway. No, Shannon's reticence seems to have been more a matter of extraordinary self-sufficiency. and much more. A book well worth reading.