Rather, it seemed to Bush and a handful of mathematicians who encountered Shannon in the late 1930s that he mightn’t be just another exceedingly bright graduate student. He was something else entirely. One professor at MIT, informed in the late 1930s that young Shannon was taking piloting lessons, considered intervening so the scientific community wouldn’t risk losing him prematurely in an air crash.4 There was, in other words, a quiet accord among the professors at MIT: People like Shannon come along so rarely that they must be protected.
