Claude Elwood Shannon Quotes

Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory". Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", that he published in 1948.

He is also well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology —he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications. Wikipedia  

✵ 30. April 1916 – 24. February 2001
Claude Elwood Shannon photo
Claude Elwood Shannon: 4   quotes 3   likes

Famous Claude Elwood Shannon Quotes

“Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.”

Coding theorems for a discrete source with a fidelity criterion. IRE International Convention Records, volume 7, pp. 142--163, 1959.
Context: This duality can be pursued further and is related to a duality between past and future and the notions of control and knowledge. Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.

“A few first rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half-finished. The latter are no credit to their writers and a waste of time to their readers.”

IRE Transactions on Information Theory (1956), volume 2, issue 1, page 3. * The Bandwagon
Shannon
Claude E.
2
1
1956
March
10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.

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