Most people know Claude Shannon – if they’ve heard of him, that is – as the father of the information age. That is, in my opinion, a big understatement.
Here are my learnings from Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s brilliant biography of Shannon, “A Mind at Play”.
By being well-versed with both Boolean algebra and electronic circuitry, Shannon was able to cross-pollinate ideas between these fields. A series connection is akin to the AND operator, while a parallel connection is akin to the OR operator.
Shannon spotted and articulated the isomorphism (as “Gödel, Escher, Bach” fans would call it) between equations in symbolic calculus and physical circuits – an act that may possibly have been inspired by his mentor Vannevar Bush’s synthesis of math and engineering in the differential analyzer.
“In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin.”
– Vannevar Bush
Is it any surprise that Shannon wrote his PhD dissertation on…genetics? In fact, it was about genetic algebra!
Shannon viewed information as messages not sent – a fascinating case in figure v/s ground. His equation expressed information (H) as a probabilistic function (p and q).
H = – p log p – q log q
This has many parallels to cryptography, for instance how the easy to anticipate “Heil Hitler” at the end of every German message helped the Allies crack Enigma, by pruning the search tree.
This work primed Shannon to discover insights into the redundancy of language – how redundancy facilitates error detection and correction in languages.
The one trait underpinning all of Shannon’s work was his playful curiosity. He experimented with juggling, winning at Roulette through wearable computers (with the great Edward Thorp, interestingly) and much more.
This reminds me of the philosophy of playfulness v/s seriousness in James Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games”. Here’s what I wrote in an email to the authors: “…’To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility’. Given the formulation of information as the resolution of uncertainty (H = – p log p – q log q), it seems like being playful is being information-rich. Perhaps Shannon’s playfulness wasn’t just a coincidence but had something to do with information theory…”
Rob Goodman very kindly wrote back: “That’s a really insightful connection between the ideas of playfulness and information theory. It makes sense to me, and I wish we had thought to make that connection in the book!”
Not only is the subject matter of the book an individual I immensely admire (Claude Shannon), it is written exceedingly well too! An absolute page-turner. Most certainly among the very best books I’ve read, and one that I would most highly recommend. 11/10
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