- The father of the information age is dead.
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- Claude Shannon, a mathematician who wrote the blueprint
for digital communications in 1948 at Bell Labs, died Saturday in a Massachusetts
nursing home. He was 84.
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- In a classic scientific paper, "The Mathematical
Theory of Communication," Shannon laid the groundwork for wireless
phones, high-speed data lines and the World Wide Web decades before technology
was up to speed.
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- At a time when computers were exotic creatures filling
entire rooms, he envisioned all communications as binary, a string of Boolean
ones and zeros now the lingua franca of pimply high school hackers.
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- "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," said Neil Sloane, an AT&T fellow who co-edited
Shannon's voluminous collected works in 1993.
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- Yet the genius whom many scientists rank with Einstein
was oblivious to these modern marvels, his mind ravaged by Alzheimer's
disease, his wife said yesterday.
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- "He would have been bemused" by it all, said
Betty Shannon.
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- Claude Shannon's bemusement with life may be the reason
he's not a household name. Although his pioneering contributions in mathematics,
computing and cryptography won many awards -- 350 scientists and engineers
from around the world came to Murray Hill to honor him in 1998 -- Shannon
was just as happy inventing pure whimsy.
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- There were rocket-powered Frisbees, motorized pogo sticks,
a mechanical mouse-in-a-maze. Nearly a half-century before Deep Blue beat
Russian master Garry Kasparov, Shannon described how to build a chess-playing
computer. For laughs, he whipped up the THROBAC-I, which computed in Roman
numerals.
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- Shannon's evening unicycle rides through the drab hallways
of Bell Labs -- while juggling -- are now part of the folklore of that
Nobel factory. His creations included a two-seater that nobody wanted to
ride, and another with an off-center hub, making him bob up and down "like
a duck," his wife said. A "W.C. Fields Juggling Machine"
bounced balls off a drum-head.
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- When his honorary degrees started piling up, Shannon
hung all the ceremonial gowns in his game room from a rotating chain, like
a dry cleaner's rack, Sloane said.
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- "I've always pursued my interests without much regard
for financial value or value to the world," Shannon once told the
IEEE Spectrum, an engineering magazine. "I've spent lots of time on
totally useless things."
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- Colleagues remembered a man of fascinating contradictions.
A loner with a sense of humor. Someone who didn't suffer fools gladly .
. . or fear looking foolish. A jazz buff who played a variety of instruments,
badly. Shannon loathed writing, his wife said. Yet he wrote papers now
considered models of scientific elegance.
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- At MIT, where Shannon joined the faculty in 1958, tales
were told of large uncashed checks languishing in his office. Money supposedly
never mattered much to him -- though acquaintances say he made a fortune
from shrewd investments, and by applying his mathematical theories to the
stock market.
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- What most impressed co-workers, however, was Shannon's
curious intellect.
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- "He had a very peculiar sort of mind," said
David Slepian, a mathematician who knew Shannon at Bell Labs in the 1950s.
"He didn't know math very deeply. But he could invent whatever he
needed."
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- Robert Gallager, an MIT professor of electrical engineering
who wrote a paper with Shannon, considers him the greatest scientist of
the 20th century.
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- "He had a weird insight. He could see through things.
He would say, 'Something like this should be true' . . . and he was usually
right," Gallager said.
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- Shannon's breezy ability to make things look easy didn't
always endear him to peers, who sometimes questioned the academic rigor
of his work. He didn't dot all his i's and cross all his t's, as Gallager
put it. Yet eventually Shannon silenced his critics.
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- "You can't develop an entire field out of whole
cloth if you don't have superb intuition," Gallager said.
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- The field is now known as information theory.
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- What Shannon outlined in 1948 was a series of mathematical
formulas to reduce communications processes to binary code -- "bits"
of information. He devised ways to calculate the maximum bits that could
be blasted through a phone line, or any other communications channel. And
he suggested ways to approach these theoretical limits, by parsing extraneous
data and correcting transmission errors.
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- It was not until the invention of integrated circuits,
many years later, that these formulas could be put to use. Now, they form
the core of compression algorithms that make it possible to pump symphonies
over the Internet and cram movies onto DVDs.
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- As Gallager explained, Shannon's paper, published in
the Bell System Technical Journal, came in an age when communications were
analog. A phone call relayed the caller's voice as a waveform, roughly
analagous to his or her speech. Different lines were needed for voice calls,
telegraph messages and video. Shannon realized that everything, once broken
into digital bits, could travel over the same pipe.
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- "He thought it all through on his own. It's very
rare in science when one person goes so far," Gallager said. "It
took a long time before people really understood it. But basically the
whole thing was there."
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- In a 1937 thesis, Shannon proved electrical circuits
could perform the basic functions of Boolean algebra -- the yes/no equations
at the heart of modern computing. During World War II, he built a digital
encryption system used by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. In
1949, another Shannon paper was credited with helping elevate cryptography
from an art to a science.
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- Born in Petoskey, Mich., on April 16, 1916, Shannon graduated
from the University of Michigan in 1936 with degrees in math and electrical
engineering. He earned advanced degrees at MIT and in 1941 joined Bell
Labs, with which he was affiliated through 1972.
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- His childhood love for gadgetry, honed on erector sets
and crystal radios, continued even when his memory gave out.
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- Betty Shannon, a former Bell Labs researcher, said her
husband would try tinkering with fax machines and walkers inside the nursing
home.
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- "He still liked to take things apart and figure
how they worked," she said.
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- Shannon is survived by a son, Andrew, who is a pianist
and composer; a daughter, Peggy, who is a geophysicist with the Union for
Concerned Scientists; two granddaughters; and a sister, Catherine S. Kay.
Private services are being handled by the Lane Funeral Home in Winchester,
Mass.
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- Kevin Coughlin covers technology. He can be reached at
kcoughlin@starledger.com or (973) 392-1763.
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- © 2001 The Star-Ledger Used with permission
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