30 Apr Anniversary of Claude Shannon
30/04/2021
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician and electrical engineer born on April 30, 1916 (105 years ago)
In 1937, Shannon wrote his master’s degree thesis “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” where he proved that Relay switching circuits for control of Differential Analysers (the first computers of that time) and telephone call routing could be devised as Boolean Algebra problems.
Using this property of electrical switches to implement logic is the fundamental concept that underlines all electronic binary digital computers. Shannon’s work became the foundation of digital circuit design, as it became widely known in the electrical engineering community during and after World War II.
Shannon’s thesis has been quoted as the most important, and the most noted, master’s thesis of the 20th century.
Next year, to commemorate this date we will write about Shannon’s remarkable works that gave him the deserved title of “the father of Information Theory”
