I've been covering technology since the time when installing silly batch files on coworkers' computers was considered an acceptable office prank. I've seen it all appear: DOS, the graphical user interface, handwriting recognition, color printers, music file formats, the hard drive, the CD-ROM, the modem. The Internet.
Now I want to devote some time to a concept that dates back to the pre-PC era. In 1948, a man changed our lives technologically in ways we still don't fully understand. That man was Claude Shannon. While working at Bell Labs, he published a paper entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," and with it the concept of information theory was born. What's remarkable about Shannon's insight is that before information was thought of as measurable, he conceived of representing it digitally. Shannon's key insight, boiled down, is that the information content of a message consists simply of the number of ones and zeros required to transmit it. He took the problem of figuring out the limits of any data-transfer method and reduced it to simple coding. This is the thought behind "bits per second," the way we measure all data transmission today. Shannon's theory also made it possible to use bits as a measure in data storage, for image files, voice streams, and so on. As we move into an era of broadband, wireless communications, and high-speed data transfer, his fundamental concepts are still valid. They're used heavily, and the limits he articulated haven't yet been reached.
Without Shannon's uncanny ability to look at somethingin this case, informationfrom a completely new point of view, many of the technologies that have developed over the past 20 years would not exist. His work was vital to the development of the CD-ROM, the hard drive, and most methods of data storage and retrieval. It also influenced the technologies that make file transfer between computers possible.
Shannon died this year at the age of 84, after a long fight with Alzheimer's disease. In Shannon's obituary on the Bell Labs site, Arun Netravali, president of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, says, "As if assuming that inexpensive, high-speed processing would come to pass, Shannon figured out the upper limits on communication rates. First in telephone channels, then in optical communications, and now in wireless, Shannon has had the utmost value in defining the engineering limits we face."
Shannon's visionary work linking entropy to communications would no doubt have been enough to secure his name in history books. But he is also credited with transforming the art of circuit design into a science with his paper "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits." And when World War II turned this great visionary's eye toward code breaking, he did the same for the art of encryption, with "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems."
One aspect of Shannon's amazing mind and personality that I find personally inspiring, though, was his ability to have fun. He was notorious for riding a unicyclewhile jugglingin the halls of Bell Labs. Neal Sloane, the editor of Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, credits Shannon (in an April 2001 article in Nature magazine) with building a computer he dubbed the THROBAC I (Thrifty Roman-numeral Backward-looking Computer), which did simple calculations using only Roman numerals. He also built a machine that juggled, a mind-reading machine, and a maze-solving electromechanical mouse.
I like to think it was Shannon's ability to set aside society's expectation that he behave like an "adult" and harness his thinking for pragmatic matters of service that let him look at complex concepts with a fresh perspective. He defined them with a clarity that those more chained to the yoke could not muster.
Modern theories of the workplace and productivity support the idea that having fun leads to more creative thinking. But even a management team that tries to make "fun" mandatory doesn't diminish Shannon's example. A man who is legendary for deep thinking, mathematical theories, and intellectual geniusokay, I'll say it, the very founder of the Information Agewas also a funny guy, legendary for his unbridled appreciation of silly antics. Even those of us without his mathematical genius can take that example and apply it to our own lives.
I could keep working on this column. But with Shannon in mind, I think I'll go contemplate fluid dynamics by lobbing water balloons off the roof.
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