Portal:Electronics/Selected biography/19
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory". Shannon was the first to describe the Boolean gates (electronic circuits) that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and also created the first machine learning device. He is credited alongside George Boole for 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. As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in electrical engineering, Shannon wrote his thesis 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 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." Shannon then graduated with a PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1940. (Full article...)