Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In 1916, the fierce battle of World War I was raging.

On April 30 of this year, a baby boy was born in Petoskey, Michigan, far from the battlefield. This baby boy is the protagonist of our article-Shannon.

Shannon's full name is Claude Elwood Shannon (ClaudeElwoodShannon). He is a famous American mathematician, inventor, cryptographer and the founder of information theory.

In other words, he is the common ancestor of all our IT and messengers now.

Shannon, a handsome boy, has lived in a small town called Gaylord since he was a child. His father, a judge of the town, was named Claude Elwood Shannon (yes, his father gave his son the same name as himself).

Shannon's mother is the headmaster of a high school in the town. Her name is Mabel Wolf Shannon (Mabel Wolf Shannon).

The father is a judge and the mother is the headmaster. In such an intellectual family, the educational atmosphere is certainly not bad.

Shannon, who was a student, has shown an amazing talent for mathematics. At the age of 8, he helped his sister with her advanced math homework. Later, his sister graduated from college and became a professor of mathematics.

In addition to mathematics, little Shannon is particularly fond of inventing, including Telegraph machines, electric boats, and various mechanical animals.

Shannon, who seemed to rebel against this hobby when he was a child, probably had a lot to do with his grandfather. His grandfather is a farmer and inventor who invented washing machines and many agricultural machinery.

It is worth mentioning that Shannon also has a distant relative who also likes to invent. The relative's name is Edison.

In 1936, Shannon, 20, graduated from the University of Michigan with a double degree in mathematics and electrical engineering. Later, he went on to pursue further studies at MIT.

Two years later, Shannon completed his master's thesis, "symbolic Analysis of Relays and switching Circuits".

In this paper, he proposed for the first time that Boolean algebra can be used to describe circuits. He corresponds the "true" and "false" of Boolean algebra and the "on" and "off" of the circuit system, and uses the two simplest numbers in mathematics, "1" and "0".

George Boolean (1815-1864), an English mathematician, proposed Boolean algebra in 1847, which is a mathematical method to calculate the truth of propositions. Shannon's paper, although only a master's thesis, is of epoch-making significance. It lays the theoretical foundation of digital circuit. Later, the emergence of computers and other equipment, all take this as the design idea.

Later, Herman Goldstein, a famous computer scientist, described the paper as "the most important master's thesis ever written" and "changed the design of circuits from art to science."

Herman Goldstein, one of the developers of ENIAC, the world's first modern electronic digital computer, Shannon won the American engineer Award of the American Alfred Noble Association, a major award in the field of electronic engineering for this paper.

Just when the world thought that the electrical engineering genius would continue to do his best, he did not follow. It wasn't until two years later that he published his doctoral thesis, Algebra of theoretical Genetics, from which he received a doctorate in mathematics from MIT.

Yes, this guy made a cross-border, from electrical engineering to biological genetics.

Shannon as a young man (a bit like Sherlock Holmes), Shannon went to Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies for a year and intersected with masters such as Einstein and Von Neumann. His research direction became a mechanical analog computer.

In 1941, Shannon published a new paper, "Mathematical Theory of differential Analyzers", which uses mechanical computers to solve differential equations.

At that time, the differential analyzer in the same year, Shannon joined the famous Bell Lab (since then until 1972).

When he first entered Bell Labs, Shannon went to the mathematics department to do war-related work-studying fire control systems and cryptography.

His code-breaking team was mainly responsible for tracking Nazi German planes and rockets. He also used mathematical means to deduce the security of system X. This X system refers to the dedicated telephone line between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Roosevelt.

In 1943, Alan Turing, a famous British mathematician and cryptographer, visited Bell Labs and had lunch with Shannon.

Alan Turing (1912-1954) in view of the special nature of their work, they did not communicate in cryptography, but more about artificial thinking machines (later AI artificial intelligence).

At the time, Shannon told Turing that he was not only content with inputting data into the "brain", but also wanted to instill cultural things into it.

The idea shocked Alan Turing, who was so surprised that he exclaimed, "he (Shannon) wants to give it some music!"

Later, with the deepening of the study of cryptography, Shannon gradually formed a complete set of cryptography theory. At the same time, he began to think about an effective communication system. The embryonic form of modern information theory gradually formed in his mind.

In 1945, he submitted a memo to Bell Labs, "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography."

From June to October 1948, Shannon serialized the paper "Mathematical Theory of Communication" that changed the trajectory of human society in the Journal of Bell system Technology. The following year, Shannon published another famous paper, Communication under noise, in the magazine.

In these two papers, Shannon gives the basic model of communication system and puts forward the concept and mathematical expression of information entropy.

The formula for calculating information entropy H if you are an engineering major and remember the principle of communication, you will know that the amount of information of a piece of information is directly related to its uncertainty.

For example: if I tell you, the world is round. For this very definite content, the amount of information is 0 (equal to a piece of nonsense). If I told you that 1 million dollars were buried under the XX tree, that would be a lot of information. The above formula is based on the certainty size to calculate the amount of information, the postgraduate entrance examination must be questions.

Shannon points out that information can be quantified and that digital coding can represent any type of information. After the information is digitized, it can be compressed and retransmitted, which greatly reduces the transmission time and transmission cost.

Shannon also introduced the concept of bit (he owes the honor of inventing the word to his colleague John Tucky), calling it "a unit for measuring information".

Bit is actually the abbreviation of binary number (binary digit). As we all know, bits later became the cornerstone of the information age. All the information we have on the Internet today is expressed in it.

In addition to information entropy, Shannon also put forward the famous Shannon formula in this paper.

To put it simply, Shannon's formula, information entropy discusses the critical value of information and data compression. Shannon's formula is to discuss the limit of communication rate.

Let's not discuss the details, ha, or everyone will run out.

We just need to know that until now with 5G, we have not escaped the clutches of Shannon's formula. What some people do all their lives is to approach the limits of Shannon's formula infinitely.

The publication of the two papers laid the foundation for information theory and caused a great shock to the academic circles, with no less influence than the invention of the world's first transistor in December 1947 (also from Bell Laboratories).

At that time, because the view of information theory was very advanced, it also aroused some doubts and opposition. Later, with the passage of time, with the rapid development of information technology, the value of information theory became more and more obvious, and Shannon established its status as a "grandfather of both information and communication".

I forgot to mention that Shannon was only 33 when he published the paper.

In 1949, Shannon published an important paper, Communication Theory of secure Systems, on the basis of the memorandum A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography.

This paper once again shocked the academic circles. "this discovery changed the code from art to science," the Boston Globe said.

This paper opens up a new idea of using information theory to study cryptography and lays the foundation of modern cryptography theory. Shannon thus became the founder and forerunner of modern cryptographic theory.

On March 27, 1949, Shannon married her colleague at Bell Labs, Mary Elizabeth Moore (Mary Elizabeth Moore), and continued to work on the scientific research she loved.

In 1952, Shannon and his wife jointly launched the famous "mouse that can walk the labyrinth"-Theseus.

Shannon and Theseus this is a wooden toy mouse with a bronze beard. Through constant random trial and error, it can pass through a maze of metal walls until it finds a piece of metal "cheese" at the exit.

The most powerful and original thing is that Theseus can remember this route, even if the walls of the labyrinth move on the next mission.

At that time, Shannon took a special video and made it into a TV program to show the mouse. The program has aroused great public interest. In people's opinion, this is a mouse that can "think".

In fact, the secret of walking the maze does not lie in the mouse, but in the maze. 75 relay switches are hidden all over the labyrinth, and through these simple devices with only switch functions, the so-called "intelligence" of mice is finally realized.

Shannon became a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1956. In 1958, he became a tenured professor.

In 1961, Shannon and colleague Thorpe built a mini-computer the size of a cigarette case, with a small box hidden in a pocket and a big toe to control the switch hidden in the shoe. What is this equipment used for? It is used to predict the results of roulette in casinos and to calculate the probability of balls landing in different positions of roulette.

With this device, the two of them actually won money in Las Vegas. Later, because he was targeted, he quickly gave up and left.

Another famous invention of Shannon is a machine that can play chess. The machine uses 150 relay switches and has good computing power. In 1965, Shannon took the machine to challenge the then world champion Mikhail Botvinnik. Although I lost in the end, I did a good job.

In 1973, at the International Symposium on Information Theory held in Ashkelon, Israel, IEEE named the Shannon Award and awarded it to Shannon himself. This practice of receiving an award named by oneself was later jokingly called the "Shannon routine".

In 1985, Shannon suddenly appeared at the International Symposium on Information Theory held in Brighton, England, causing a sensation. The young scholars who attended the meeting could hardly believe their own eyes and actually saw the ancestor of information theory. What is even more eye-popping is that Shannon unexpectedly performed parabolic juggling at the venue, making the whole venue more boiling.

Shannon was still a master of investment and stock speculation at that time, and was good at using arbitrage to earn wealth quickly.

On August 11, 1986, the famous Barron Weekly summarized the recent performance of 1026 mutual funds. Shannon ranked first.

Just now we mentioned that Shannon praised parabolic juggling at the venue. In fact, Shannon loved juggling all his life. At a very young age, he learned to ride a unicycle and catch the ball. When he was working at Bell Labs, he used to ride a unicycle to and from work, which became a beautiful scenery.

An acrobatic genius delayed by science to the point of obsession with Shannon's love of juggling in his later years. He spent a lot of time practicing hard and constantly improving his level of juggling. He even has a doctorate in juggling, which is regarded as a treasure.

In addition to juggling, he is also keen on making toys. He built various strange toys such as flamejets, rocket-driven Frisbees, automatic chess robots, and so on.

Inspired by the later artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed a robot called the "termination machine". When you turn the switch on, the box opens and sticks out a manipulator, which turns the switch back on, and then retracts the manipulator back into the box.

The Ultimate Machine.

Shannon's home in Winchester, Massachusetts (Shannon calls it the Entropy House) is full of his gadgets. At least 30 strange unicycles are stored in his garage, including a unicycle without pedals, a unicycle with square tires and a unicycle specially designed for two people.

The real old urchin Shannon also raised juggling to a theoretical level and began to write a unified juggling field theory.

Unfortunately, before this work was finished, Shannon died of Alzheimer's disease on February 26, 2001 at the age of 85.

Professor Richard Brahut (Richard Blahut), a famous scholar, said of Shannon at the inauguration ceremony of the Shannon statue, which is located in Shannon's hometown of Gaylord.

"in my opinion, two or three hundred years later, when people look back at us, they may not remember who was the president of the United States. They won't remember who was a movie star or a rock star. But they will still know Shannon's name. Information theory will still be taught in schools."

Salute! The great father of information theory-Claude Elwood Shannon!

References:

1. Shannon's information theory, where is the cow, Zhihu, Keyanjun

2. Shannon, the Father of the Information Age: lay the foundation of artificial intelligence with a wooden mouse.

3. Shannon Biography: creating the Information Age from 0 to 1, CITIC Press, Jimmy Sony, Rob Goodman

4. Information theory, a fulcrum for prying the earth, Kun Peng's theory.

5. What are the anecdotes of Shannon Claude Shannon?

6. Shannon, Ding Jiu, father of information theory

Claude Elwood Shannon, Baidu Encyclopedia entry

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fresh Jujube classroom (ID:xzclasscom), author: Xiaozaojun

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