By the end of his Bell Labs summer and his arrival at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton that fall, the name “Claude Shannon” was pinging its way through math and engineering circles. Vannevar Bush had, of course, helped it along. But others were noticing the young mathematician as well. Norbert Wiener, by then no longer a genius in training under his father but a highly respected mathematician in his own right, wrote in 1940 that he thought Shannon “a man of extraordinary brilliancy and intelligence. . . . He has already done work of great originality and is with no doubt a coming man.”
On September 27, 1940, Oswald Veblen of the Institute for Advanced Study touted Shannon in a note to Thornton Fry. Veblen saw in Shannon a rare talent and shared a Shannon paper with Orrin Frink, a leader in the mathematical field of topology. At MIT, too, Shannon had been identified as a standout. On October 21, H. B. Phillips, the head of MIT’s math department, cabled a fellow faculty member: “Mr. Shannon is one of the ablest graduates we have ever had and can do first class research in any field in which he becomes interested.” The recipient of that message was Marston Morse, who had a field of mathematics named after him, and who joined Wiener and Von Neumann as three out of just seven winners of the Bôcher Memorial Prize, one of math’s highest honors.
Morse. Phillips. Frink. Fry. Veblen. Bush. By this point, Shannon had acquired an imposing roster of supporters and patrons; these were math’s kingmakers, and even without the usual conspicuous striving of the ambitious and talented, he had earned their backing. He had left a mark on men who were discerning judges of raw intellectual horsepower, and they found in him one of their own.
Shuttled up and down the coast, from one elite institution to another, from one set of mentors to another, from fellowship to fellowship: there is sometimes a kind of placelessness that settles into these scientific stories, and Shannon’s in particular. In this, the travels of the ambitious young scientist resemble nothing so much as the spiraling journey of the ambitious civil servant of an earlier age, as described memorably by Benedict Anderson:
He sees before him a summit rather than a centre. He travels up its corniches in a series of looping arcs which, he hopes, will become smaller and tighter as he nears the top. . . . On this journey there is no assured resting-place; every pause is provisional. The last thing the functionary wants is to return home; for he has no home with any intrinsic value. And this: on his upward-spiraling road he encounters as eager fellow-pilgrims his functionary colleagues, from places and families he has scarcely heard of and surely hopes never to have to see.
Who were Shannon’s new traveling companions in Princeton? Where did they come from?
There was John von Neumann, a Jewish-Hungarian prodigy, who by the age of six could crack jokes in ancient Greek or give you the quotient of 93,726,784 divided by 64,733,647 (or any other eight-digit numbers) without pencil and paper. He was the kind of student who once literally brought a tutor to tears of awe, who spent a college lecture on “unsolved problems in mathematics” doodling the solutions in his notebook. We owe to Von Neumann much of game theory (the formal study of strategic decisions, as in the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma), and much of the intellectual architecture of modern computers, and a decent chunk of quantum mechanics. Shannon called him “the smartest person I’ve ever met”; it was a common opinion. What began as a relationship of starstruck admiration—“I was a graduate student—he was one of the great mathematicians of the world,” said Shannon—would evolve in later years into something more like an equal partnership between two pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence.
There was Hermann Weyl, a refugee from the Nazis, both a mathematician and philosopher of physics. As a mathematician, Weyl worked to reconcile the revolution in quantum mechanics with the doctrines of classical physics. As a philosopher, he considered Einstein’s work on the relativity of space and time not only a turning point in science, but a new insight into the relationship between human consciousness and the external world. Just two years after Einstein published his theory of general relativity, Weyl wrote the definitive treatment of relativity’s philosophical foundations. “It is as if a wall which separated us from Truth has collapsed,” he exulted. “It has brought us much nearer to grasping the plan that underlies all physical happening.” This was highly rarefied stuff by Shannon’s standards, and it may have been with some trepidation that Shannon sat down in Weyl’s office to pitch to his new advisor a research program for the next year.
Weyl was generally dismissive of Shannon’s genetics work (as was Shannon himself, by this point), but Shannon could converse fluently on modern physics, and he won Weyl over by developing an analogy between the quantum weirdness with which physicists were grappling and the problems in communications mathematics that he was just beginning to puzzle through. What if the mathematical model for a message sent over telephone or telegraph wires had something in common with the models for the motion of elementary particles? What if the content of any message and the path of any particle could be described not as mechanical motions, or as randomized nonsense, but as random-looking processes that obeyed laws of probability—what physicists called “stochastic” processes? Think of “the fluctuations in the price of stocks, the ‘random walk’ of a drunk in a sidewalk”—think, for that matter, of a clarinet solo—happenings that were less than fixed but more than chance: maybe “intelligence” and electrons were alike in that way, taking haphazard walks within probability’s bounds. That got Weyl’s attention.
It was one of the early hints that a mathematics of messaging might have something more to say than the most efficient design of a telephone network: that it might offer something more fundamental about “the plan” that the greatest physicists believed they had glimpsed. It was still only a guess, maybe a useful analogy and nothing more; but with Weyl’s approval, Shannon brought his full-time attention to bear on the questions of “intelligence” that he had first raised in his letter to Bush.
And, of course, there was Einstein. He had seen his books burned by the Nazis and had read his own name on a list of assassination targets; like Weyl, he had escaped Germany early, and had made his home in Princeton since 1933. There are a few Einstein-and-Shannon stories, and though they surely cannot all be true at the same time, we offer them all in the interest of completeness.
Norma recalled: “I poured tea for [Einstein], and he told me I was married to a brilliant, brilliant man.” She elaborated in another interview, when she said that Einstein eyed her over his teacup and remarked, “Your husband has the greatest mind I have ever come across.” The anecdote has been repeated often, but it almost certainly never happened. For one thing, by 1940, Shannon had done some interesting, important work, but nothing that would have attracted Einstein’s attention. Physics, after all, wasn’t Shannon’s field. Further, unlike others at the IAS, we have no record of Shannon trying to elbow his way into audiences with the world’s best-known and most-sought-after scientists. Nothing in Shannon’s behavior would have indicated his interest in subjecting Einstein to a newly minted PhD’s thoughts on this or that, and so the scene simply doesn’t square with what we know of Shannon. (The more conspicuous John Nash, by contrast, insisted on meeting with Einstein even as a young student and spent an hour walking him through his thoughts on “gravity, friction, and radiation,” according to biographer Sylvia Nasar. At the end of the session, Einstein said, “You had better study some more physics, young man.”)
On the other hand, a story from Claude’s friend and fellow juggling professor, Arthur Lewbel, is more plausible—and suggests that Einstein had more practical interests than the quality of Shannon’s mind:
The story is that Claude was in the middle of giving a lecture to mathematicians in Princeton, when the door in the back of the room opens, and in walks Albert Einstein. Einstein stands listening for a few minutes, whispers something in the ear of someone in the back of the room, and leaves. At the end of the lecture, Claude hurries to the back of the room to find the person that Einstein had whispered to, to find out what the great man had to say about his work. The answer: Einstein had asked directions to the men’s room.
Lewbel recalls Shannon sharing this story twice—the only difference being that, in the other version, Einstein was after directions to tea and cookies, an ending that Lewbel confessed was more likely.
Beyond that, Shannon only recalled that he would often pass Einstein on the way to work in the morning, “and he usually would walk along in sort of bedroom slippers and had old clothes hanging on and he looked like a transient almost, I’d say, and I’d go along in my car and I’d wave at him and he’d wave back. He didn’t know really who I was but he’d wave back. Probably he thought I was some kind of weirdo.”
Beyond everything else, Norma’s story of life-altering Einsteinian praise seems hard to reconcile with Claude’s version of benign neglect. Whatever their conflicting accounts tell us about Einstein, they shed some light on the two very different people Norma and Claude were discovering in one another, to their growing dismay: theatrical and taciturn, expansive and self-contained. Less than a year into their marriage, it seemed that they had little in common beyond a fondness for jazz.
In truth, the Institute for Advanced Study proved unhealthy for Shannon. For some, it was a land of academic lotus-eating, an island where the absence of the ordinary worries of the job—students, deadlines, publication pressure—proved enervating rather than invigorating. The physicist Richard Feynman, who was working on his doctorate at Princeton while Shannon was at the IAS down the street, observed the inertia firsthand: “A kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. . . . You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!”
There were only a few months of this for Shannon, rather than a lifetime. He never stagnated in the way that Feynman found all too common among the lifers. But the quiet of the place, and his freedom from obligation, played into his lifelong tendency to isolate himself. Most days were spent shut indoors, alternating between the notepad and the clarinet, and back again. He would hardly even move to turn from math to music—only reposition himself in the chair beside his desk, put on a jazz record, and take up his clarinet to accompany it. Teddy Grace, an earthy southern alto, was his favorite singer:
Turn off the moon, that heavenly spotlight above
Turn off the stars, for I’m falling madly in love. . . .
Norma was isolated, too. A plan to finish college at nearby Rutgers fell through. Cut off from her family and friends in a sleepy college town (especially sleepy after New York and Paris and Boston), she had no desire to be a housewife at twenty—and yet here she was. Norma worked to fill the days. She invited the institute professors over for tea as often as she could, and, on the strength of her fluency in French, found a job with the Economic Section of the League of Nations, which like so many of the academics at her teas had been driven out of Europe by war.
But it wasn’t enough. No amount of prodding could make Claude share her passion for politics: “You know where my interests are, and that’s enough.” Norma grew convinced that Claude was depressed—but, whatever the cause, the marriage ended as quickly as it began. After the final fight, Norma left Princeton on the train back to Manhattan. Once the divorce was official, she went west, and on the start of her real life: to California, the screenwriting career she’d wanted since she was a child, Communist Party meetings, marriage to a Hollywood fellow traveler, the blacklist, and self-exile to Europe.
Why we love the people we do is one of the enduring human mysteries—surpassed only, perhaps, by the mysterious nature of the stories we tell ourselves about those loves. What, if anything, Claude might have told himself about the end of his relationship with Norma is lost to us. We have the facts: that they married quickly, discovered cracks in their bond in late 1940, and divorced thereafter.
But we know something else, too: we know of the other great struggle in Shannon’s personal life during this fraught time. On September 16, 1940, only days after Shannon arrived at Princeton, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Service and Training Act, requiring all male citizens from twenty-one to thirty-five to register for the military draft. On October 16, 1940, the mass registration began. The United States had not yet formally joined the war, but the president and his advisors had seen enough of the totalitarian threat to understand its seriousness. On signing the act, Franklin Roosevelt issued a warning: “America stands at the crossroads of its destiny. Time and distance have been shortened. A few weeks have seen great nations fall. We cannot remain indifferent to the philosophy of force now rampant in the world. We must and will marshal our great potential strength to fend off war from our shores.”
What those high-flown words meant for the twenty-four-year-old Shannon and men of his generation was the very real possibility that they would be sent overseas to fight a war—a prospect that, up to this point, had still seemed remote. But signing his name to a registration card surely focused Shannon’s mind on the grim reality of having to put his research on hold—indeed, put his entire life on hold—and don a uniform.
For Shannon, this was not a welcome prospect. While we have no indication that he went out of his way to avoid the draft, we do know that he was not the least bit eager to deploy overseas. In his own words,
Things were moving fast there, and I could smell the war coming along. And it seemed to me I would be safer working full-time for the war effort, safer against the draft, which I didn’t exactly fancy. I was a frail man, as I am now. . . . I was trying to play the game, to the best of my ability. But not only that, I thought I’d probably contribute a hell of a lot more.
In another interview, he recalled that “if you can make yourself more useful somewhere else you won’t get into the Army. That seemed to me a wise move.” A friend noted that Shannon, an introvert, worried not only about the dangers of an overseas deployment but also about the close quarters of Army life: “I think he did the work with that fear in him, that he might have to go into the Army, which means being with lots of people around which he couldn’t stand. He was phobic about crowds and people he didn’t know.”
So Shannon turned to his Bell Labs mentor, Thornton Fry, who managed to secure him a contract doing mathematical analysis for the National Defense Research Committee. The leadership of the NDRC was a who’s who of the nation’s scientists and engineers—and it included most of the key figures in Shannon’s professional circle, including the man who had plucked Shannon out of the Midwest: Vannevar Bush.
Bush was the NDRC’s godfather. He had firsthand experience of the breakdown in communication between military officers and civilian scientists during World War I, so when he outlined the need for a federal committee to bridge the gap, he spoke with force and conviction. And he carried that conviction into the Oval Office on June 12, 1940, to make the case for the NDRC to the president himself. It took all of ten minutes for FDR to say yes. “There were those who protested that the action of setting up NDRC was an end run,” Bush later wrote, “a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers acting outside established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons. That, in fact, is exactly what it was.”
For Shannon, the NDRC would represent an end run of a different kind: it freed him from his worries about the draft board. He would, like many mathematicians of his generation, put his mind, rather than his body, to work on the country’s behalf.