Claude Shannon Case

Claude Shannon was an American mathematician, electric engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory". He was born in Michigan in 1916. In his childhood, Shannon's interest in mechanical things was inspired by his grandfather who was an inventor and a farmer. Shannon earned his B.S. degree at Michigan University in 1936. Later he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied both electrical engineering and mathematics. He joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1941 and spent most of his career working there. Shannon achieved a lot of rewards and honors through his life.

Shannon made two major contributions to the development of information. The first one is founding Information Theory. He raised the idea of using quantitative method to express information, which means information could be treated like a measurable physical quantity. More importantly, the concept of information in information theory has nothing to do with the meaning of a message. It is more likely a degree of uncertainty that can be measured and treated mathematically.

A significant feature of this part of information theory is the concept of entropy. Shannon demonstrated entropy as a shortage in the information content in a message. It is a measurement of randomness in the system. For example, the level of entropy in Chinese is higher than in English, so Chinese is more complicated and uncertain from the information aspect. Shannon also proved that information could always be transmitted in noise without distortion because of entropy. Thus Shannon defined his understanding of information as something used to reduce uncertainty, or increase in certainty in the opposite saying.

The other contribution of Shannon is the Symbolic Logic and Switching Theory, which is basically the idea of binary digits. Shannon stated that he fundamental unit of information is a yes-no situation. Either something is or is not. This can