The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing achievements and advancements made in field of communications (radio, mobile, wireless, telecommunications, data communications, networks, and Internet). The prize is awarded by the Marconi Society and it includes a work of sculpture. Recipients of the prize are awarded at the Marconi Society's annual symposium and gala.
102-688: Occasionally, the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award is bestowed on legendary late-career individuals, recognizing their transformative contributions and remarkable impacts to the field of communications and to the development of the careers of students, colleagues and peers, throughout their lifetimes. So far, the recipients include Claude E. Shannon (2000, died in 2001), William O. Baker (2003, died in 2005), Gordon E. Moore (2005), Amos E. Joel Jr. (2009, died in 2008), Robert W. Galvin (2011, died in 2011), Thomas Kailath (2017) and Vint Cerf (2023). The Marconi Prize
204-557: A Roman numeral computer called THROBAC, and juggling machines . He built a device that could solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle. Shannon also invented flame-throwing trumpets , rocket-powered frisbees , and plastic foam shoes for navigating a lake, and which to an observer, would appear as if Shannon was walking on water. Shannon designed the Minivac 601 , a digital computer trainer to teach business people about how computers functioned. It
306-409: A (uniform) discrete set of samples. This theory was essential in enabling telecommunications to move from analog to digital transmissions systems in the 1960s and later. He further wrote a paper in 1956 regarding coding for a noisy channel, which also became a classic paper in the field of information theory. Claude Shannon's influence has been immense in the field, for example, in a 1973 collection of
408-545: A PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940, with his thesis focused on genetics , with it deriving important results, but it went unpublished. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense of the United States during World War II , including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications , writing a paper which is considered one of the foundational pieces of modern cryptography, with his work described as "a turning point, and marked
510-477: A complicated problem and find the right way to look at it, so that things become very simple." In an obituary by Neil Sloane and Robert Calderbank , they stated that "Shannon must rank near the top of the list of major figures of twentieth century science". Due to his work in multiple fields, Shannon is also regarded as a polymath . Historian James Gleick noted the importance of Shannon, stating that "Einstein looms large, and rightly so. But we’re not living in
612-455: A connection, and nearly half of Americans and people in several other countries used the Internet on a regular basis. However throughout the 1990s, "getting online" entailed complicated configuration, and dial-up was the only connection type affordable by individual users; the present day mass Internet culture was not possible. In 1989, about 15% of all households in the United States owned
714-512: A dedicated home video game console according to an Entertainment Software Association annual industry report . By 2012, over 2 billion people used the Internet, twice the number using it in 2007. Cloud computing had entered the mainstream by the early 2010s. In January 2013, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported owning a smartphone . By 2016, half of the world's population was connected and as of 2020, that number has risen to 67%. In
816-618: A dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. By the early 1980s, along with improvements in computing power , the proliferation of the smaller and less expensive personal computers allowed for immediate access to information and the ability to share and store it. Connectivity between computers within organizations enabled access to greater amounts of information. The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed ) exabytes (EB) in 1986 to 15.8 EB in 1993; over 54.5 EB in 2000; and to 295 (optimally compressed) EB in 2007. This
918-571: A few months in the summer of 1937, and returned there to work on fire-control systems and cryptography during World War II , under a contract with section D-2 (Control Systems section) of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Shannon is credited with the invention of signal-flow graphs , in 1942. He discovered the topological gain formula while investigating the functional operation of an analog computer. For two months early in 1943, Shannon came into contact with
1020-420: A footnote near the beginning of the classified report, Shannon announced his intention to "develop these results … in a forthcoming memorandum on the transmission of information." While he was at Bell Labs, Shannon proved that the cryptographic one-time pad is unbreakable in his classified research that was later published in 1949. The same article also proved that any unbreakable system must have essentially
1122-518: A half-mile away. While growing up, he also worked as a messenger for the Western Union company. Shannon's childhood hero was Thomas Edison , whom he later learned was a distant cousin. Both Shannon and Edison were descendants of John Ogden (1609–1682), a colonial leader and an ancestor of many distinguished people. In 1932, Shannon entered the University of Michigan , where he was introduced to
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#17328520759261224-460: A human brain has been estimated to lie between 10^15 and 10^17. While this number is impressive, even in 2007 humanity's general-purpose computers were capable of performing well over 10^18 instructions per second. Estimates suggest that the storage capacity of an individual human brain is about 10^12 bytes. On a per capita basis, this is matched by current digital storage (5x10^21 bytes per 7.2x10^9 people). Genetic code may also be considered part of
1326-470: A mechanical mouse could move through. Below the surface were sensors that followed the path of a mechanical mouse through the maze. After much trial and error, this device would learn the shortest path through the maze, and direct the mechanical mouse through the maze. The pattern of the maze could be changed at will. Mazin Gilbert stated that Theseus "inspired the whole field of AI. This random trial and error
1428-409: A network of networks. The Whole Earth movement of the 1960s advocated the use of new technology. In the 1970s, the home computer was introduced, time-sharing computers , the video game console , the first coin-op video games, and the golden age of arcade video games began with Space Invaders . As digital technology proliferated, and the switch from analog to digital record keeping became
1530-455: A personal computer. For households with children, nearly 30% owned a computer in 1989, and in 2000, 65% owned one. Cell phones became as ubiquitous as computers by the early 2000s, with movie theaters beginning to show ads telling people to silence their phones. They also became much more advanced than phones of the 1990s, most of which only took calls or at most allowed for the playing of simple games. Text messaging became widely used in
1632-560: A science of intelligent machines, but also held a broader view of viable approaches in automata studies, such as neural nets, Turing machines, cybernetic mechanisms, and symbolic processing by computer. Shannon co-organized and participated in the Dartmouth workshop of 1956, alongside John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester , and which is considered the founding event of the field of artificial intelligence. In 1956 Shannon joined
1734-407: A sender wants to transmit. Shannon developed information entropy as a measure of the information content in a message, which is a measure of uncertainty reduced by the message. In so doing, he essentially invented the field of information theory . The book The Mathematical Theory of Communication reprints Shannon's 1948 article and Warren Weaver 's popularization of it, which is accessible to
1836-399: A single MOS chip by the late 1960s. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors , as engineers began recognizing that a complete computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip. In 1968, Fairchild engineer Federico Faggin improved MOS technology with his development of the silicon-gate MOS chip, which he later used to develop
1938-403: A standard until the mid-2000s outside Japan. The World Wide Web became publicly accessible in 1991, which had been available only to government and universities. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina introduced Mosaic , the first web browser capable of displaying inline images and the basis for later browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Stanford Federal Credit Union
2040-420: Is " Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems ", a declassified version of his wartime work on the mathematical theory of cryptography, in which he proved that all theoretically unbreakable cyphers must have the same requirements as the one-time pad. He is credited with the introduction of sampling theorem , which he had derived as early as 1940, and which is concerned with representing a continuous-time signal from
2142-402: Is a conceptual descendant of Shannon's publication in 1948: "He's one of the great men of the century. Without him, none of the things we know today would exist. The whole digital revolution started with him." The cryptocurrency unit shannon (a synonym for gwei) is named after him. Shannon is credited by many as single-handedly creating information theory and for laying the foundations for
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#17328520759262244-478: Is about communication itself, Warren Weaver communicated his ideas in such a way that those not acclimated to complex theory and mathematics could comprehend the fundamental laws he put forth. The coupling of their unique communicational abilities and ideas generated the Shannon-Weaver model , although the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings emanate entirely from Shannon's work after Weaver's introduction. For
2346-505: Is awarded based on the candidate’s contributions in the following areas: The Marconi Prize winners are also named as Marconi Fellows . The foundation and the prize are named after the honor of Guglielmo Marconi , a Nobel laureate and one of the pioneers of radio communications. Recipients of the Marconi Prize are also expected to pursue further creative work to advance the understanding and development of communications technology for
2448-512: Is the foundation of artificial intelligence." Shannon wrote multiple influential papers on artificial intelligence, such as his 1950 paper titled "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", and his 1953 paper titled "Computers and Automata". Alongside John McCarthy , he co-edited a book titled Automata Studies , which was published in 1956. The categories in the articles within the volume were influenced by Shannon's own subject headings in his 1953 paper. Shannon shared McCarthy’s goal of creating
2550-421: Is the informational equivalent to less than one 730- megabyte (MB) CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person); roughly four CD-ROM per person in 1993; twelve CD-ROM per person in the year 2000; and almost sixty-one CD-ROM per person in 2007. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014, the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from
2652-799: The Analytical Engine , but it was never successfully built, and was largely forgotten by the 20th century and unknown to most of the inventors of modern computers. The Second Industrial Revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century developed useful electrical circuits and the telegraph . In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith developed electromechanical tabulating and calculating devices using punch cards and unit record equipment , which became widespread in business and government. Meanwhile, various analog computer systems used electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic systems to model problems and calculate answers. These included an 1872 tide-predicting machine , differential analysers , perpetual calendar machines,
2754-563: The Deltar for water management in the Netherlands, network analyzers for electrical systems, and various machines for aiming military guns and bombs. The construction of problem-specific analog computers continued in the late 1940s and beyond, with FERMIAC for neutron transport, Project Cyclone for various military applications, and the Phillips Machine for economic modeling. Building on
2856-588: The Digital Age . The artificial intelligence large language model family Claude (language model) was named in Shannon's honor. A Mind at Play , a biography of Shannon written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, was published in 2017. They described Shannon as "the most important genius you’ve never heard of, a man whose intellect was on par with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton ". Consultant and writer Tom Rutledge, writing for Boston Review , stated that "Of
2958-624: The Industrial Revolution , to an economy centered on information technology . The onset of the Information Age has been linked to the development of the transistor in 1947 and the optical amplifier in 1957. These technological advances have had a significant impact on the way information is processed and transmitted. According to the United Nations Public Administration Network , the Information Age
3060-524: The Intel 4004 , the first single-chip microprocessor. It was released by Intel in 1971, and laid the foundations for the microcomputer revolution that began in the 1970s. MOS technology also led to the development of semiconductor image sensors suitable for digital cameras . The first such image sensor was the charge-coupled device , developed by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, based on MOS capacitor technology. The public
3162-563: The LEO being the first commercially available general-purpose computer. Digital communication became economical for widespread adoption after the invention of the personal computer in the 1970s. Claude Shannon , a Bell Labs mathematician, is credited for having laid out the foundations of digitalization in his pioneering 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication . In 1948, Bardeen and Brattain patented an insulated-gate transistor (IGFET) with an inversion layer. Their concept, forms
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3264-531: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in electrical engineering, his thesis concerned switching circuit theory , demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship, thereby establishing the theory behind digital computing and digital circuits . The thesis has been claimed to be the most important master's thesis of all time, as in 1985, Howard Gardner described it as "possibly
3366-593: The Netherlands became the first countries to completely transition from analog to digital television . In September 2007, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having broadband internet at home. According to estimates from the Nielsen Media Research , approximately 45.7 million U.S. households in 2006 (or approximately 40 percent of approximately 114.4 million) owned a dedicated home video game console , and by 2015, 51 percent of U.S. households owned
3468-467: The T-carrier for long-haul pulse-code modulation (PCM) digital voice transmission. The T1 format carried 24 pulse-code modulated, time-division multiplexed speech signals each encoded in 64 kbit/s streams, leaving 8 kbit/s of framing information which facilitated the synchronization and demultiplexing at the receiver. Over the subsequent decades the digitisation of voice became the norm for all but
3570-676: The University of California, San Diego ; one at Bell Labs; and another at AT&T Shannon Labs . The statue in Gaylord is located in the Claude Shannon Memorial Park. After the breakup of the Bell System , the part of Bell Labs that remained with AT&T Corporation was named Shannon Labs in his honor. In June 1954, Shannon was listed as one of the top 20 most important scientists in America by Fortune . In 2013, information theory
3672-420: The abacus , astrolabe , equatorium , and mechanical timekeeping devices. More complicated devices started appearing in the 1600s, including the slide rule and mechanical calculators . By the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had produced mass-market calculators like the arithmometer and the enabling technology of the punch card . Charles Babbage proposed a mechanical general-purpose computer called
3774-401: The digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging , storage , and transmission media , whereby vast increases in the rapidity of information growth would be made possible through automated , potentially- lossless digital technologies. Accordingly, Moore's law , formulated around 1965, would calculate that the number of transistors in
3876-567: The earth to the sun . The amount of digital data stored appears to be growing approximately exponentially , reminiscent of Moore's law . As such, Kryder's law prescribes that the amount of storage space available appears to be growing approximately exponentially. The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed ) information in 1986; 715 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1993; 1.2 (optimally compressed) zettabytes in 2000; and 1.9 zettabytes in 2007,
3978-476: The information revolution . Now that sequencing has been computerized, genome can be rendered and manipulated as data. This started with DNA sequencing , invented by Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam in 1976-1977 and Frederick Sanger in 1977, grew steadily with the Human Genome Project , initially conceived by Gilbert and finally, the practical applications of sequencing, such as gene testing , after
4080-474: The journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2016 reported that: Digital technology has vastly exceeded the cognitive capacity of any single human being and has done so a decade earlier than predicted. In terms of capacity, there are two measures of importance: the number of operations a system can perform and the amount of information that can be stored. The number of synaptic operations per second in
4182-419: The planar process developed by Jean Hoerni . In 1963, complementary MOS (CMOS) was developed by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor . The self-aligned gate transistor, which further facilitated mass production, was invented in 1966 by Robert Bower at Hughes Aircraft and independently by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs. In 1962 AT&T deployed
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4284-618: The "father of the Information Age ". Shannon was the first to describe the Boolean gates (electronic circuits) that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and was one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence . Shannon is credited with laying the foundations of the Information Age . At the University of Michigan , Shannon dual degreed , graduating with a Bachelor of Science in both electrical engineering and mathematics in 1936. A 21-year-old master's degree student at
4386-528: The 1990s, the spread of the Internet caused a sudden leap in access to and ability to share information in businesses and homes globally. A computer that cost $ 3000 in 1997 would cost $ 2000 two years later and $ 1000 the following year, due to the rapid advancement of technology. The world's technological capacity to compute information with human-guided general-purpose computers grew from 3.0 × 10 MIPS in 1986, to 4.4 × 10 MIPS in 1993; to 2.9 × 10 MIPS in 2000; to 6.4 × 10 MIPS in 2007. An article featured in
4488-594: The MIT faculty, holding an endowed chair. He worked in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He continued to serve on the MIT faculty until 1978. Shannon developed Alzheimer's disease and spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home ; he died in 2001, survived by his wife, a son and daughter, and two granddaughters. Outside of Shannon's academic pursuits, he was interested in juggling , unicycling , and chess . He also invented many devices, including
4590-583: The Scientific Age and the Industrial Age all, ultimately, induced discontinuous and irreversible changes in the economic, social and cultural elements of the daily life of most people. Traditionally, these epochs have taken place over hundreds, or in the case of the Neolithic Revolution, thousands of years, whereas the Information Age swept to all parts of the globe in just a few years, as a result of
4692-404: The United States; their first survey showed that 8.2% of all U.S. households owned a personal computer in 1984, and that households with children under the age of 18 were nearly twice as likely to own one at 15.3% (middle and upper middle class households were the most likely to own one, at 22.9%). By 1989, 15% of all U.S. households owned a computer, and nearly 30% of households with children under
4794-459: The advent of the Imagination Age . The digital revolution converted technology from analog format to digital format. By doing this, it became possible to make copies that were identical to the original. In digital communications, for example, repeating hardware was able to amplify the digital signal and pass it on with no loss of information in the signal. Of equal importance to the revolution
4896-454: The age of 18 owned one. By the late 1980s, many businesses were dependent on computers and digital technology. Motorola created the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTac , in 1983. However, this device used analog communication - digital cell phones were not sold commercially until 1991 when the 2G network started to be opened in Finland to accommodate the unexpected demand for cell phones that
4998-458: The arrangement of the electromechanical relays that were used during that time in telephone call routing switches . Next, he expanded this concept, proving that these circuits could solve all problems that Boolean algebra could solve. In the last chapter, he presented diagrams of several circuits, including a digital 4-bit full adder. His work differed significantly from the work of previous engineers such as Akira Nakashima , who still relied on
5100-470: The basis of CMOS and DRAM technology today. In 1957 at Bell Labs, Frosch and Derick were able to manufacture planar silicon dioxide transistors, later a team at Bell Labs demonstrated a working MOSFET. The first integrated circuit milestone was achieved by Jack Kilby in 1958. Other important technological developments included the invention of the monolithic integrated circuit chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, made possible by
5202-597: The benefit of mankind. Past winners of the Marconi Prize include Lawrence E. Page and Sergey Brin for the development of web search company Google , Tim Berners-Lee for his leadership and innovations in the World Wide Web , Nobel Laureate Charles K. Kao for developing fiber-optic communications , and Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie for their work in security - the Diffie–Hellman key exchange . The first award
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#17328520759265304-650: The cafeteria. Turing showed Shannon his 1936 paper that defined what is now known as the " universal Turing machine ". This impressed Shannon, as many of its ideas complemented his own. In 1945, as the war was coming to an end, the NDRC was issuing a summary of technical reports as a last step prior to its eventual closing down. Inside the volume on fire control, a special essay titled Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems , coauthored by Shannon, Ralph Beebe Blackman , and Hendrik Wade Bode , formally treated
5406-697: The close of the war, he prepared a classified memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography", dated September 1945. A declassified version of this paper was published in 1949 as " Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems " in the Bell System Technical Journal . This paper incorporated many of the concepts and mathematical formulations that also appeared in his A Mathematical Theory of Communication . Shannon said that his wartime insights into communication theory and cryptography developed simultaneously, and that "they were so close together you couldn't separate them". In
5508-475: The closure of classical cryptography and the beginning of modern cryptography." The work of Shannon is the foundation of secret-key cryptography , including the work of Horst Feistel , the Data Encryption Standard (DES) , Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) , and more. As a result, Shannon has been called the "founding father of modern cryptography". His mathematical theory of communication laid
5610-488: The complexity of the Z1 and Z2 , German inventor Konrad Zuse used electromechanical systems to complete in 1941 the Z3 , the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. Also during World War II, Allied engineers constructed electromechanical bombes to break German Enigma machine encoding. The base-10 electromechanical Harvard Mark I was completed in 1944, and
5712-500: The complicated ad hoc circuits of this analyzer, Shannon designed switching circuits based on Boole's concepts . In 1937, he wrote his master's degree thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits , with a paper from this thesis published in 1938. A revolutionary work for switching circuit theory , Shannon diagramed switching circuits that could implement the essential operators of Boolean algebra . Then he proved that his switching circuits could be used to simplify
5814-401: The computer pioneers who drove the mid-20th-century information technology revolution—an elite men’s club of scholar-engineers who also helped crack Nazi codes and pinpoint missile trajectories—Shannon may have been the most brilliant of them all." Electrical engineer Robert Gallager stated about Shannon that "He had this amazing clarity of vision. Einstein had it, too – this ability to take on
5916-822: The discovery by Myriad Genetics of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene mutation. Sequence data in Genbank has grown from the 606 genome sequences registered in December 1982 to the 231 million genomes in August 2021. An additional 13 trillion incomplete sequences are registered in the Whole Genome Shotgun submission database as of August 2021. The information contained in these registered sequences has doubled every 18 months. During rare times in human history, there have been periods of innovation that have transformed human life. The Neolithic Age ,
6018-413: The electrical engineering community during and after World War II . The theoretical rigor of Shannon's work superseded the ad hoc methods that had prevailed previously. Howard Gardner hailed Shannon's thesis "possibly the most important, and also the most noted, master's thesis of the century." One of the reviewers of his work commented that "To the best of my knowledge, this is the first application of
6120-458: The existent circuit theory of the time and took a grounded approach. Shannon's idea were more abstract and relied on mathematics, thereby breaking new ground with his work, with his approach dominating modern-day eletrical engineering. Using electrical switches to implement logic is the fundamental concept that underlies all electronic digital computers . Shannon's work became the foundation of digital circuit design, as it became widely known in
6222-402: The first 16 years of Shannon's life were spent in Gaylord, where he attended public school, graduating from Gaylord High School in 1932. Shannon showed an inclination towards mechanical and electrical things. His best subjects were science and mathematics. At home, he constructed such devices as models of planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a barbed-wire telegraph system to a friend's house
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#17328520759266324-408: The following year. In 2002, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having a mobile phone . In late 2005 the population of the Internet reached 1 billion, and 3 billion people worldwide used cell phones by the end of the decade. HDTV became the standard television broadcasting format in many countries by the end of the decade. In September and December 2006 respectively, Luxembourg and
6426-477: The foundations for the field of information theory, with his famous paper being called the " Magna Carta of the Information Age" by Scientific American , along with his work being described as being at "the heart of today's digital information technology ". Robert G. Gallager referred to the paper as a "blueprint for the digital era". Regarding the influence that Shannon had on the digital age, Solomon W. Golomb remarked "It's like saying how much influence
6528-546: The founding event of the field of artificial intelligence. Rodney Brooks declared that Shannon was the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies, and Solomon W. Golomb described the intellectual achievement of Shannon as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century". His achievements are considered to be on par with those of Albert Einstein , Sir Isaac Newton , and Charles Darwin . The Shannon family lived in Gaylord, Michigan , and Claude
6630-611: The groundwork for the advent of civilization. The Scientific Age began in the period between Galileo 's 1543 proof that the planets orbit the Sun and Newton 's publication of the laws of motion and gravity in Principia in 1697. This age of discovery continued through the 18th century, accelerated by widespread use of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg . The Industrial Age began in Great Britain in 1760 and continued into
6732-426: The information equivalent of 174 newspapers per person per day. The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way Telecommunications networks was 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986; 471 petabytes in 1993; 2.2 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000; and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, the information equivalent of six newspapers per person per day. In
6834-403: The inventor of the alphabet has had on literature." Shannon's theory is widely used and has been fundamental to the success of many scientific endeavors, such as the invention of the compact disc , the development of the Internet , feasibility of mobile phones, the understanding of black holes , and more, and is at the intersection of numerous important fields. Shannon also formally introduced
6936-506: The key papers in the field of information theory, he was author or coauthor of 12 of the 49 papers cited, while no one else appeared more than three times. Even beyond his original paper in 1948, he is still regarded as the most important post-1948 contributor to the theory. In May 1951, Mervin Kelly , received a request from the director of the CIA , general Walter Bedell Smith , regarding Shannon and
7038-440: The last mile (where analogue continued to be the norm right into the late 1990s). Following the development of MOS integrated circuit chips in the early 1960s, MOS chips reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar integrated circuits by 1964. MOS chips further increased in complexity at a rate predicted by Moore's law , leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with hundreds of transistors on
7140-700: The late 1980s, less than 1% of the world's technologically stored information was in digital format, while it was 94% in 2007, with more than 99% by 2014. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has increased from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, to some 5,000 exabytes in 2014 (5 zettabytes ). Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years where sufficient space made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs , which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons and other institutions. Rider did not foresee, however,
7242-515: The late 1990s worldwide, except for in the United States of America where text messaging didn't become commonplace till the early 2000s. The digital revolution became truly global in this time as well - after revolutionizing society in the developed world in the 1990s, the digital revolution spread to the masses in the developing world in the 2000s. By 2000, a majority of U.S. households had at least one personal computer and internet access
7344-419: The layman, Weaver's introduction better communicates The Mathematical Theory of Communication , but Shannon's subsequent logic, mathematics, and expressive precision was responsible for defining the problem itself. Information Age The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during
7446-576: The leading British mathematician Alan Turing . Turing had been posted to Washington to share with the U.S. Navy 's cryptanalytic service the methods used by the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to break the cyphers used by the Kriegsmarine U-boats in the north Atlantic Ocean . He was also interested in the encipherment of speech and to this end spent time at Bell Labs. Shannon and Turing met at teatime in
7548-625: The methods of symbolic logic to so practical an engineering problem. From the point of view of originality I rate the paper as outstanding." Shannon's master thesis won the 1939 Alfred Noble Prize . Shannon received his PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940. Vannevar Bush had suggested that Shannon should work on his dissertation at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory , in order to develop a mathematical formulation for Mendelian genetics . This research resulted in Shannon's PhD thesis, called An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics . However,
7650-409: The mid-19th century. The invention of machines such as the mechanical textile weaver by Edmund Cartwrite, the rotating shaft steam engine by James Watt and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney , along with processes for mass manufacturing, came to serve the needs of a growing global population. The Industrial Age harnessed steam and waterpower to reduce the dependence on animal and human physical labor as
7752-425: The most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century", while Herman Goldstine described it as "surely ... one of the most important master's theses ever written ... It helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science." It has also been called the "birth certificate of the digital revolution ", and it won the 1939 Alfred Noble Prize . Shannon then graduated with
7854-456: The need for him, as Shannon was regarded as, based on "the best authority" the "most eminently qualified scientist in the particular field concerned". As a result of the request, Shannon became part of the CIA's Special Cryptologic Advisory Group or SCAG. In 1950, Shannon, designed, and built with the help of his wife, a learning machine named Theseus. It consisted of a maze on a surface, through which
7956-589: The new standard in business, a relatively new job description was popularized, the data entry clerk . Culled from the ranks of secretaries and typists from earlier decades, the data entry clerk's job was to convert analog data (customer records, invoices, etc.) into digital data. In developed nations, computers achieved semi-ubiquity during the 1980s as they made their way into schools, homes, business, and industry. Automated teller machines , industrial robots , CGI in film and television, electronic music , bulletin board systems , and video games all fueled what became
8058-717: The new theorem unworked out by other population geneticists of the time. In 1940, Shannon became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey . In Princeton, Shannon had the opportunity to discuss his ideas with influential scientists and mathematicians such as Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann , and he also had occasional encounters with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel . Shannon worked freely across disciplines, and this ability may have contributed to his later development of mathematical information theory. Shannon had worked at Bell Labs for
8160-549: The non-specialist. Weaver pointed out that the word "information" in communication theory is not related to what you do say, but to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. Shannon's concepts were also popularized, subject to his own proofreading, in John Robinson Pierce 's Symbols, Signals, and Noise . Information theory's fundamental contribution to natural language processing and computational linguistics
8262-410: The problem of smoothing the data in fire-control by analogy with "the problem of separating a signal from interfering noise in communications systems." In other words, it modeled the problem in terms of data and signal processing and thus heralded the coming of the Information Age . Shannon's work on cryptography was even more closely related to his later publications on communication theory . At
8364-1287: The rapidly advancing speed of information exchange. Between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic period, humans began to domesticate animals, began to farm grains and to replace stone tools with ones made of metal. These innovations allowed nomadic hunter-gatherers to settle down. Villages formed along the Yangtze River in China in 6,500 B.C., the Nile River region of Africa and in Mesopotamia ( Iraq ) in 6,000 B.C. Cities emerged between 6,000 B.C. and 3,500 B.C. The development of written communication ( cuneiform in Sumeria and hieroglyphs in Egypt in 3,500 B.C. and writing in Egypt in 2,560 B.C. and in Minoa and China around 1,450 B.C.) enabled ideas to be preserved for extended periods to spread extensively. In all, Neolithic developments, augmented by writing as an information tool, laid
8466-437: The relativity age, we’re living in the information age. It’s Shannon whose fingerprints are on every electronic device we own, every computer screen we gaze into, every means of digital communication. He’s one of these people who so transform the world that, after the transformation, the old world is forgotten." Gleick further noted that "he created a whole field from scratch, from the brow of Zeus ". On April 30, 2016, Shannon
8568-520: The same characteristics as the one-time pad: the key must be truly random, as large as the plaintext, never reused in whole or part, and kept secret. In 1948, the promised memorandum appeared as "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", an article in two parts in the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal . This work focuses on the problem of how best to encode the message
8670-421: The term " bit ". Shannon made numerous contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, writing papers on programming a computer for chess, which have been immensely influential. His Theseus machine was the first electrical device to learn by trial and error, being one of the first examples of artificial intelligence. He also co-organized and participated in the Dartmouth workshop of 1956, considered
8772-410: The thesis went unpublished after Shannon lost interest, but it did contain important results. Notably, he was one of the first to apply an algebraic framework to study theoretical population genetics. In addition, Shannon devised a general expression for the distribution of several linked traits in a population after multiple generations under a random mating system, which was original at the time, with
8874-471: The work of George Boole . He graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees : one in electrical engineering and the other in mathematics. In 1936, Shannon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on Vannevar Bush 's differential analyzer , which was an early analog computer that was composed of electromechanical parts and could solve differential equations . While studying
8976-473: The zeitgeist of the 1980s. Millions of people purchased home computers, making household names of early personal computer manufacturers such as Apple , Commodore, and Tandy. To this day the Commodore 64 is often cited as the best selling computer of all time, having sold 17 million units (by some accounts) between 1982 and 1994. In 1984, the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting data on computer and Internet use in
9078-479: Was a numerical analyst at Bell Labs. They were married in 1949. Betty assisted Claude in building some of his most famous inventions. They had three children. Shannon presented himself as apolitical and an atheist . There are six statues of Shannon sculpted by Eugene Daub : one at the University of Michigan ; one at MIT in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems ; one in Gaylord, Michigan; one at
9180-554: Was also invented in the late 1980s. Disney's CAPS system (created 1988) was used for a scene in 1989's The Little Mermaid and for all their animation films between 1990's The Rescuers Down Under and 2004's Home on the Range . Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The first public digital HDTV broadcast was of the 1990 World Cup that June; it was played in 10 theaters in Spain and Italy. However, HDTV did not become
9282-482: Was becoming apparent in the late 1980s. Compute! magazine predicted that CD-ROM would be the centerpiece of the revolution, with multiple household devices reading the discs. The first true digital camera was created in 1988, and the first were marketed in December 1989 in Japan and in 1990 in the United States. By the early 2000s, digital cameras had eclipsed traditional film in popularity. Digital ink and paint
9384-462: Was born in a hospital in nearby Petoskey . His father, Claude Sr. (1862–1934), was a businessman and, for a while, a judge of probate in Gaylord. His mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon (1880–1945), was a language teacher, who also served as the principal of Gaylord High School . Claude Sr. was a descendant of New Jersey settlers , while Mabel was a child of German immigrants. Shannon's family was active in their Methodist Church during his youth. Most of
9486-495: Was first introduced to the concepts that led to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I , CYCLADES , Merit Network , Tymnet , and Telenet , were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols . The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking , in which multiple separate networks could be joined into
9588-630: Was formed by capitalizing on computer miniaturization advances, which led to modernized information systems and internet communications as the driving force of social evolution . There is ongoing debate concerning whether the Third Industrial Revolution has already ended and if the Fourth Industrial Revolution has already begun due to the recent breakthroughs in areas such as artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. This next transition has been theorized to harken
9690-481: Was further established in 1951, in his article "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", showing upper and lower bounds of entropy on the statistics of English – giving a statistical foundation to language analysis. In addition, he proved that treating space as the 27th letter of the alphabet actually lowers uncertainty in written language, providing a clear quantifiable link between cultural practice and probabilistic cognition. Another notable paper published in 1949
9792-403: Was given in 1975. 1975–1996 1997–present This award -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Claude E. Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician , electrical engineer , computer scientist , cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory " and as
9894-581: Was honored with a Google Doodle to celebrate his life on what would have been his 100th birthday. The Bit Player , a feature film about Shannon directed by Mark Levinson premiered at the World Science Festival in 2019. Drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon in his house in the 1980s, the film was released on Amazon Prime in August 2020. Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication, begins with an interpretation of his own work by Warren Weaver . Although Shannon's entire work
9996-407: Was listed as one of the top 10 revolutionary scientific theories by Science News . According to Neil Sloane , an AT&T Fellow who co-edited Shannon's large collection of papers in 1993, the perspective introduced by Shannon's communication theory (now called "information theory") is the foundation of the digital revolution , and every device containing a microprocessor or microcontroller
10098-602: Was sold by the Scientific Development Corp starting in 1961. He is also considered the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O. Thorp . The device was used to improve the odds when playing roulette . Shannon married Norma Levor , a wealthy, Jewish, left-wing intellectual in January 1940. The marriage ended in divorce after about a year. Levor later married Ben Barzman . Shannon met his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore (Betty), when she
10200-474: Was the ability to easily move the digital information between media, and to access or distribute it remotely. One turning point of the revolution was the change from analog to digitally recorded music. During the 1980s the digital format of optical compact discs gradually replaced analog formats, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes , as the popular medium of choice. Humans have manufactured tools for counting and calculating since ancient times, such as
10302-505: Was the first financial institution to offer online internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996 OP Financial Group , also a cooperative bank , became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. The Internet expanded quickly, and by 1996, it was part of mass culture and many businesses listed websites in their ads. By 1999, almost every country had
10404-527: Was to some degree improved with inspiration from Charles Babbage's designs. In 1947, the first working transistor , the germanium -based point-contact transistor , was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs . This led the way to more advanced digital computers . From the late 1940s, universities, military, and businesses developed computer systems to digitally replicate and automate previously manually performed mathematical calculations, with
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