After 1948, the Bell Labs bureaucracy could not touch him—which was precisely as Shannon preferred it. Henry Pollak, director of Bell Labs’ Mathematics Division, spoke for a generation of Bell leaders when he declared that Shannon “had earned the right to be non-productive.” Shannon arrived at the Murray Hill office late, if at all, and often spent the day absorbed in games of chess and hex in the common areas. When not besting his colleagues in board games, he could be found piloting a unicycle through Bell Labs’ narrow passageways, occasionally while juggling; sometimes he would pogo-stick
...more
