Shannon's Thunderbolts of Intuition

Claude Shannon's career was defined by two thunderbolts of insight. When he was 21, in 19 38, his master's thesis showed that any logical statement could be evaluated by a machine. He then returned to the deep problem underlying the transatlantic cable fiasco and created a unified mathematical theory of transmitting information. We now take it for granted that information might represent anything a computer game or a spread sheet, or music or phonography. But that idea started with shannon. Before him, rhesearchers only dimly grasped the distinction between the meaning of a message and the quantity of information. It contained the idea of compressing a file so that it took up less space -