Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

juggle.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#51

Post by streptomycin »

lqet wrote: post #7

Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue: > In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with hi…

Average life expectancy for someone with Alzheimer's is 5.8 years [0], so Shannon's couldn't really have been quickly progressing unless he was diagnosed extremely early.

I remember when my mom got it, I did a bunch of research and figured out that she probably only had about 3 more years of okayish memory and a decent quality of life, and then maybe 5 more years after that until death. That stuff depends on age and gender, and my mom was young so I think those numbers are even shorter for someone who is old and male like Shannon. There is of course plenty of variability and some people live decades with it.

So yeah, doesn't sound like "very quick" progression. But if your baseline is a healthy adult aging normally, it would still seem very quick compared to that, I guess.

[0] https://www.healthline.com/health/alzheimers/life-expectancy

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#52

Post by vitus »

naveen99 wrote: post #18
FredPret wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels. It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles. At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1. If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice th…

It’s close though. Iq sd is 15. 200 is about 6.7 sd above mean. Odds of being 6.5 standard deviations away is 1 in 12 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...

Don't forget you also have to divide by two (so, 1 in 24 billion) if you only want to consider the upper end of the range, since that number is essentially "fraction of the population that doesn't fall within mean +/- 6.5 stdev".

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#53

Post by awanderingmind »

kaycebasques wrote: post #17

From what I read in The Dream Machine , Shannon sounded like a super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922

That was an interesting (and short!) read. Most of what he wrote is applicable to ML/AI today. A direct link to the pdf for those too lazy to click twice: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#54

Post by thicknavyrain »

ColinWright wrote: post #50
docdeek wrote: post #12

> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler... I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.

I have an Erdös number of 2[ ] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling. AMA. [ ] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.

Just want to say, I recognised your name immediately when I saw it. Saw a talk you gave at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury back in 2010 when I was a teenager and it is still, to this day, one of the best popular mathematics talks I've ever witnessed (obviously helped by the immense juggling talent).

I've gone on to do a PhD in Physics and write lots of popular science for some big YouTube channels (SciShow, Veritasium) and among some of the more long term influences on my career I definitely count your talk as one of them!

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#55

Post by ColinWright »

ColinWright wrote: post #50
docdeek wrote: post #12

> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler... I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.

I have an Erdös number of 2[ ] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling. AMA. [ ] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.

I was tired last night ... it has been a long week, so I forgot that the single asterisk is used for italics ... hence the screwed up formatting.

It's not too late to edit it, so here is the comment as intended:

========

I have an Erdös number of 2[+] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling.

AMA.

[+] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#56

Post by ColinWright »

thicknavyrain wrote: post #54
ColinWright wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an Erdös number of 2[ ] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling. AMA. [ ] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.

Just want to say, I recognised your name immediately when I saw it. Saw a talk you gave at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury back in 2010 when I was a teenager and it is still, to this day, one of the best popular mathematics talks I've ever witnessed (obviously helped by the immense juggling talent). I've gone on to do a PhD in Physics and write lots of popular science for some big YouTube channels (SciShow,…

That's very kind ... thank you ... and excellent that you are carrying on the task of making science accessible.

Keep it up!

PS: I see from the data you've put on the site formerly (and to be honest, still) known as Twitter that I pass reasonably close to you sporadically and irregularly, but every month or so on average. If you'd like to meet for coffee[0] and cake at some point, my contact details are in my profile.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#57

Post by [deleted] »

jasonhong wrote: post #13

Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article ( https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s... ): He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the s…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#58

Post by n4r9 »

FredPret wrote: post #19
naveen99 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s close though. Iq sd is 15. 200 is about 6.7 sd above mean. Odds of being 6.5 standard deviations away is 1 in 12 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...

Sure, but we can’t say someone has a 1-in-12B intelligence when we only have 8B (or whatever) people. We can only go as high as 1-in-

That sounds wrong. Perhaps you're confusing frequency with likelihood?

IQ is standardised so that population scores on a standard test have a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. It's possible to obtain this with as fewer than 100 people, distributed as:

* One "genius" who scores 200

* One "dumbass" who scores 0

* 87 "everyman" who score 100.

The mean here is clearly 100, and the variance is sqrt(20000/89) = 14.99.

Of course this is very contrived and doesn't look much like a Bell curve in the first place. But with say a million people it wouldn't take much to come up with a more realistic looking example.

Re: Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

#59

Post by a_dabbler »

madcaptenor wrote: post #34
jll29 wrote: post #28

Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973." That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself. - Turing never won the Turing Award. - Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award. - Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize h…

I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were: Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her. Walter Payto…

I think the Taylor Swift example is more awkward - to have an award named after you and then given to you and never given to anyone else!
Post reply on HN