Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001), Volume 49, Number 1

While his incredibly inventive mind enriched many fields, Claude Shannon's enduring fame will surely rest on his 1948 work " A mathematical theory of communication " [7] and the ongoing revolution in information technology it engendered. Shannon, born April 30, 1916, in Petoskey, Michi-gan, obtained bachelor's degrees in both mathematics and electrical engineering at the University of Michigan in 1936. He then went to M.I.T., and after spending the summer of 1937 at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he wrote one of the greatest master's theses ever, published in 1938 as " A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits " [8], in which he showed that the symbolic logic of George Boole's nineteenth century Laws of Thought provided the perfect mathematical model for switching theory (and indeed for the subsequent " logic design " of digital circuits and computers). This work was awarded the prestigious Alfred Noble Prize of the combined engineering societies of the United States in 1940. Spending the summer of 1938 at Woods Hole, Shannon decided to put the Mendelian laws of inheritance on a proper mathematical footing. His Ph.D. thesis in mathematics (M.I.T., 1940), " An algebra for theoretical genetics " , was the result. Done in complete isolation from the community of population geneticists, this work went unpublished until it appeared in 1993 in Shannon's Collected Papers [5], by which time its results were known independently and genetics had become a very different subject. After his Ph.D. thesis Shannon wrote nothing further about genetics, and he expressed skepticism about attempts to expand the domain of information theory beyond the communications area for which he created it. Starting in 1938 Shannon worked at M.I.T. with Vannevar Bush's " differential analyzer " , the ancestral analog computer. After another summer (1940) at Bell Labs, he spent the academic year 1940–41 working under the famous mathematician Hermann Weyl at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he also began thinking about recasting communications on a proper mathematical foundation. In 1941 he returned to Bell Labs for the next fifteen years, initially working on projects related to the war effort. In 1945 Shannon wrote a classified report, " A mathematical theory of cryptography " , which was finally declassified and published in 1949 in the Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ) as the " Communication theory of secrecy systems " [6]. Perhaps it was from thinking about cryptography in terms …