Claude Elwood Shannon was born on April 30, 1916, in Gaylord, Michigan, and died on February 24, 2001, in Medford, Massachusetts. Trained as both an electrical engineer and a mathematician, he is remembered as the father of information theory, the field that made it possible to measure and reason about information in exact terms.
While a graduate student at MIT, Shannon wrote a 1937 master’s thesis titled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.” In it he showed that the two-valued Boolean algebra of true and false could describe the behavior of networks of relays and switches. This connection between symbolic logic and electrical circuits became one of the foundations of digital logic design, the way computers are built out of switching elements.
In 1948, working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the Bell System Technical Journal. The paper treated communication as a precise engineering problem: how to encode a message, send it over a possibly noisy channel, and recover it reliably. It introduced the bit as the unit of information, defined entropy as a measure of a source’s uncertainty, and established the idea of channel capacity.
Shannon’s work transformed how engineers understood communication and storage. His framework underlies modern digital systems, from data compression and error-correcting codes to the design of communication networks, and his combination of Boolean logic and information measurement helped shape the theory behind computing itself.