(Michigan, USA, 1916 – Medford, USA, 2001)
American electronic engineer and mathematician. He is considered the father of Information Theory. In 1932 he completed his secondary studies, where he excelled in science and mathematics. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan, where he graduated in 1936. That same year, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he obtained a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering by presenting his thesis A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits. In 1940 he defended his doctoral thesis entitled An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics, based on the application of Boolean algebra to data analysis. At MIT he worked with the differential analyzer, a mechanical computer prototype developed by Vannevar Bush to obtain numerical solutions to ordinary differential equations. During the 1940-41 academic year he collaborated with the German mathematician Hermann Weyl at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It is then that Shannon begins to develop his ideas about Information Theory. Beginning in 1941, Shannon worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey as a research mathematician until 1972.
In 1948 he published a method for expressing information qualitatively, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in the Bell System Technical Journal. Shannon started from the fact that an information source is composed of a finite number of symbols that consume a finite time when transmitted through a channel. For its treatment he introduced for the first time the concept of 'bit'. His theory argued that all sources and all communication channels have the same unit of measurement. He used binary code to homogenize forms of information, whether texts, images or sounds. In 1956 he was appointed visiting professor of Communication Sciences and Mathematics at MIT.
His last work was about artificial intelligence. He designed some programs for the game of chess, as well as a mechanical mouse with the ability to learn in mazes described in Programming a computer for playing chess. His proposal materialized in the first chess game played in 1956 by the Los Alamos MANIAC computer. In this same year, he published a paper demonstrating that a universal Turing machine could be built with just two states. Likewise, he devised numerous applications in the field of automatic machines: calculators, musical instruments, mechanical toys or watches.
He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Society of London. His work was recognized on many occasions: 1940 Alfred Noble Award from the American Civil Engineering Associations, 1949 the Morris Liebman Memorial Award from the Radio Engineering Institute, 1954 he was awarded a Master of Science by the University from Yale, 1955 the Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute, 1956 the Corporation of Researchers Award, 1961 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Michigan, 1962 Rice University awarded him the Medal of Honor and the Princeton named him an Honorary Doctor, 1964 the Universities of Edinburgh and Pittsburgh awarded him honorary Doctorate appointments, 1966 the IEEE Medal of Honor and the National Medal of Science, awarded by President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1970 he was named Doctor Honoris Causa by Northwestern University, 1972 the Harvey Prize awarded by the Technion of Haifa (Israel), 1975 the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) made him a foreign member, 1978 he was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Oxford and received the Joseph Jacquard and Harold Pender Prizes, 1982 the East Anglia University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate, 1985 he received the Kyoto Prize, 1987 he received the Gold Medal awarded by the Society of Audio Engineering and the appointment of an Honorary Doctor. Cause by Tufts University, 1991 the University of Pennsylvania named him an Honorary Doctorate and the Eduard Rhein Foundation of Germany awarded him the Basic Research Prize, 2000 he was awarded the Marconi Lifetime Achievement Award by the Marconi Foundation and in 2004 he was incorporated into the American Inventors Hall of Fame.
