Claude Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon was an American electrical engineer and mathematician known as the father of information theory. His 1937 master's thesis at MIT, showing that Boolean algebra could be used to design and simplify electrical switching circuits, has been called the intellectual foundation of digital circuit design. In his landmark 1948 paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, he introduced the concept of information entropy as a quantitative measure of the information carried by a message and formalized the term bit for a binary unit of information, establishing the mathematical framework underlying all subsequent digital communication and computing. He also proved the theoretical security of the one-time pad cipher and, in 1956, helped organize the Dartmouth workshop widely considered the founding event of artificial intelligence as a field. He received the National Medal of Science in 1966, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honor the same year, and the inaugural Claude E. Shannon Award in 1973.