A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni

He worked with levity and played with gravity; he never acknowledged a distinction between the two. His genius lay above all in the quality of the puzzles he set for himself.

was more than that: Shannon’s work left its lasting mark on generations of American engineers and mathematicians, in part, because it resonated with their fundamental values. What were those values? Simplicity matters. Elegant math was forceful math. Inessential items, superfluous writing, extra work—all of them should be discarded. In his way of approaching mathematics as an exercise in getting down to the essentials, Shannon produced work that would be regarded as remarkably self-contained, polished, intuitive, and, of course, brilliant—on par with F=ma or E=mc2. A group of Russian mathematicians wrote that in Shannon’s work, “the logical and natural development of sections into each other makes an impression that the problem is developing itself.” They called this impression the mathematical virtue of “integrity,” the sense that a Shannon paper is a seamless whole. Still another of Shannon’s contemporaries put it more poetically: “[His] ideas form a beautiful symphony, with repetition of themes and growing power that still form an inspiration to all of us. This is mathematics at its very best.”