Inspiring is an understatement. Mankind at its best. So many great contributions he made. “Information is the resolution of uncertainty” - Claude Shannon
He was born in rural Gaylord, Michigan. He used to pedal around the halls of Bell Labs on his unicycle while juggling balls, and he used it as an experiment into multiplexing information.
Just finish my bachelor's thesis. I used entropy to evaluate the noise of my system and end up finding such intrensic properties. At this moment, I realised that the concept of entropy is as deep as the Einstein's E=mc^2 formula
Isn't math beautiful? The greatness of Shannon's idea was SIMPLICITY! He switched from CONCRETE physical signal to ABSTRACT mathematical symbols (0 and 1-s). You can transmit numbers any way you want,regardless of the mean.Of course the technology had to keep up with the gazillions of 0 and 1 through continuous miniaturization.
Yes. He made digital information processing attractive, thus inducing the demand for and supply of faster vector processing units, which are needed, for AI.
What a great man. A note to the graphic designer: it irks all scientists when you write the formula incorrectly and when you represent digits with high as ones AND zeros.
Serious question. Why did innovators during this era choose to seek employment with large corporations rather then attempt to entrepeneurially build their own companies from the ground up, like it seems most do today?
Carlos Jiménez Wonderful answer. Thanks & kudos to you! It does show how impressive Elon Musk is to have both physics/scientific & business/leadership knowledge. I heard a story that Musk focused on business after reading about how, in the past, so many scientists had their ideas taken by the corporations they worked for and were not properly compensated financially or by given credit for their discoveries. Also how Tesla died almost penniless was a huge warning to him.
You're mixing business people with scientists/engineers. The former make money. The latter move scientific knowledge forward. Shannon's work had a tremendous contribution to science and engineering and that is why he's fellow of top engineering universities and research companies. You don't see that kind of contributions to the "entrepreneurs" you have in mind. So, not much of a difference between today, and back then.
1. I guess you did not know who started the Silicon Valley. If you read the history of Silicon Valley, you will learn they were innovators and some of them were very good scientists. 2. There were, there are and there will always be those geniuses whose goals in life is more than money. Wilhelm Rntgen, the discoverer of X Ray for example. In the extreme side, think Grigori Perelman, who declined the Fields medal and the Clay Millennium prize. These are just a few come to mind. 3. Actually Claude Shannon was very gifted with investing too, including early investment in HP. Now, talk about who founded HP...
Because large corporations at the time gave them money and toys to work on their ideas. Silicon Valley wasn't a thing back then really, and getting funding for your startup was unheard of. Also, @V Lo, I would not put Elon Musk in the same line as Claude Shannon. Elon Musk is just a kid.
