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Both papers derive from a technical report, "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography"[0], written by Shannon in 1945 — 3 years before his breakthrough papers in the Bell Labs Technical Journal.
From what I understand, before Shannon showed up no one knew how to calculate the Channel Capacity of a medium and how to deal with noise in the medium. So people just yelled louder or yelled repeatedly to get things across with better reliability. And when channel capacity was exceeded with everyone yelling too much, no one knew it had exceeded and lot of energy and time was wasted with increasing errors in the syst…
> In 1985 he made an unexpected appearance at the International Information Theory Symposium in Brighton, England. The meeting was proceeding smoothly, if uneventfully, when news raced through the halls and lecture rooms that the snowy-haired man with the shy grin who was wandering in and out of the sessions was none other than Claude Shannon. Some of those at the conference had not even known he was still alive.
> At the banquet, the meeting’s organizers somehow persuaded Shannon to address the audience. He spoke for a few minutes and then—fearing that he was boring his audience, he recalled later—pulled three balls out of his pockets and began juggling. The audience cheered and lined up for autographs.
> In 1973, he recalled, he persuaded Shannon to give the first annual Shannon lecture at the International Information Theory Symposium, but Shannon almost backed out at the last minute. “I never saw a guy with so much stage fright,” Berlekamp said. “In this crowd, he was viewed as a godlike figure, and I guess he was worried he wouldn’t live up to his reputation.” > In 1985 he made an unexpected appearance at the In…
Shannon was famous for his entropy.
From what I understand, before Shannon showed up no one knew how to calculate the Channel Capacity of a medium and how to deal with noise in the medium. So people just yelled louder or yelled repeatedly to get things across with better reliability. And when channel capacity was exceeded with everyone yelling too much, no one knew it had exceeded and lot of energy and time was wasted with increasing errors in the syst…
[1]. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774
Funny timing. Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcast had an episode about Shannon. He sounds like a fun guy to have been around. https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-fritterin-aw...
The timing is a little less funny if you know that I listened to the podcast shortly before finding the IEEE article. The podcast was great! I would think that many on HN would find it interesting.
Tim Harford's other podcasts are great too - More or Less, and 50 Things Which Made the Modern Economy.
Does anyone have any recommendations along similar lines?
https://curiositystream.com/video/3831
If you sign up through a YouTube promotional link, you also get access to Nebula for free:
> In 1973, he recalled, he persuaded Shannon to give the first annual Shannon lecture at the International Information Theory Symposium, but Shannon almost backed out at the last minute. “I never saw a guy with so much stage fright,” Berlekamp said. “In this crowd, he was viewed as a godlike figure, and I guess he was worried he wouldn’t live up to his reputation.” > In 1985 he made an unexpected appearance at the In…
> At the banquet, the meeting’s organizers somehow persuaded Shannon to address the audience. He spoke for a few minutes and then—fearing that he was boring his audience, he recalled later—pulled three balls out of his pockets and began juggling. Shannon was famous for his entropy.
When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanises but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the term you will always be at an advantage!
From:
http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/what-von-neumann-said-to-s...