Excerpt

Claude Shannon’s monumental paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” was published in The Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. Appearing at the midpoint of the twentieth century, Shannon’s paper marked the definitive shift from the analog to the digital: it introduced the word “bit” into popular and scientific parlance; it showed how any message could be encoded as a sequence of bits; and it derived the fundamental mathematical formulae for how many bits of information could be reliably sent down a communication channel in the presence of noise.

It is difficult to overstate the paper’s influence on science, technology, and society at large. Within a few years of its publication, the popular furor over information theory led to wildly overstated promises for how information theory would transform human beings’ understanding of literature, social systems, the nascent theory of computation, biology, game theory, politics, and more. Warren Weaver’s excited introduction to the 1949 book publication of Shannon’s theory—by which time the tentative “A” in the title had been changed to the definitive “The”—only fanned the flames. The popular impact was so great that in 1956 Shannon felt compelled to write his celebrated “Bandwagon” article, protesting that information theory could only contribute to areas where its mathematical implications were rigorously explored and understood.

Bibliography

Gardner, H. 1987. The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Shannon, C. E. 1938. “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.” Transactions of the AIEE 57 (12): 713–723. https://doi.org/10.1109/t-aiee.1938.5057767.

—. 1941. “Mathematical Theory of the Differential Analyzer.” Journal of Mathematics and Physics 20 (1–4): 337–354. https://doi.org/10.1002/sapm1941201337.

—. 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (3): 379–423. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.

—. 1949. “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems.” Bell System Technical Journal 28 (4): 656–715. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1949.tb00928.x.

—. 1951. “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English.” Bell System Technical Journal 30 (1): 50–64. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1951.tb01366.x.

—. 1956. “The Bandwagon (editorial).” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2 (1): 3–3. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.

Sloane, N. J. A., and A. D. Wyner. 1993. “Biography of Claude Elwood Shannon.” In Claude Elwood Shannon 1916–2001: Collected Papers, edited by N. J. A. Sloane and A. D. Wynder, xi–xvii. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press.

Wiener, N. 1948. Cybernetics. New York, NY: Wiley.

Zurek, W. H., ed. 1989. Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

BACK TO Foundational Papers in Complexity Science