The ancient art of mathematics . . . does not reward speed so much as patience, cunning and, perhaps most surprising of all, the sort of gift for collaboration and improvisation that characterizes the best jazz musicians.
—Gareth Cook
With his marriage to Norma over, Shannon was a bachelor again, with no attachments, a small Greenwich Village apartment, and a demanding job. His evenings were mostly his own, and if there’s a moment in Shannon’s life when he was at his most freewheeling, this was it. He kept odd hours, played music too loud, and relished the New York jazz scene. He went out late for raucous dinners and dropped by the chess clubs in Washington Square Park. He rode the A train up to Harlem to dance the jitterbug and take in shows at the Apollo. He went swimming at a pool in the Village and played tennis at the courts along the Hudson River’s edge. Once, he tripped over the tennis net, fell hard, and had to be stitched up.
His home, on the third floor of 51 West Eleventh Street, was a small New York studio. “There was a bedroom on the way to the bathroom. It was old. It was a boardinghouse . . . it was quite romantic,” recalled Maria Moulton, the downstairs neighbor. Perhaps somewhat predictably, Shannon’s space was a mess: dusty, disorganized, with the guts of a large music player he had taken apart strewn about on the center table. “In the winter it was cold, so he took an old piano he had and chopped it up and put it in the fireplace to get some heat.” His fridge was mostly empty, his record player and clarinet among the only prized possessions in the otherwise spartan space. Claude’s apartment faced the street. The same apartment building housed Claude Levi-Strauss, the great anthropologist. Later, Levi-Strauss would find that his work was influenced by the work of his former neighbor, though the two rarely interacted while under the same roof.
Though the building’s live-in super and housekeeper, Freddy, thought Shannon morose and a bit of a loner, Shannon did befriend and date his neighbor Maria. They met when the high volume of his music finally forced her to knock on his door; a friendship, and a romantic relationship, blossomed from her complaint.
Maria encouraged him to dress up and hit the town. “Now this is good!” he would exclaim when a familiar tune hit the radio on their drives. He read to her from James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, the latter his favorite author. He was, she remembered, preoccupied with the math problems he worked over in the evenings, and he was prone to writing down stray equations on napkins at restaurants in the middle of meals. He had few strong opinions about the war or politics, but many about this or that jazz musician. “He would find these common denominators between the musicians he liked and the ones I liked,” she remembered. He had become interested in William Sheldon’s theories about body types and their accompanying personalities, and he looked to Sheldon to understand his own rail-thin (in Sheldon’s term, ectomorphic) frame.
A few Bell Labs colleagues became Shannon’s closest friends. One was Barney Oliver. Tall, with an easy smile and manner, he enjoyed scotch and storytelling. Oliver’s easygoing nature concealed an intense intellect: “Barney was an intellect in the genius range, with a purported IQ of 180,” recalled one colleague. His interests spanned heaven and earth—literally. In time, he would become one of the leaders of the movement in the search for extraterrestrial life. Tom Perkins, cofounder of the famed Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm, remembered Oliver’s ability to seize on a topic, no matter how obscure. “If the prospect of building devices to communicate with dolphins captured his fancy, that’s what he did for months on end,” Perkins recalled. He was the brains behind “Project Cyclops,” the “ingenious and noble albeit unfulfilled” plan to connect 1,000 100-meter satellite dishes across a thirty-six-square-mile stretch of land with the goal of amplifying radio waves enough to detect interstellar chatter.
Oliver’s earthbound pursuits were equally ambitious. They included “the world’s first programmable desktop calculator,” its handheld offspring, and the first Hewlett-Packard computer. Oliver also held the distinction of being one of the few to hear about Shannon’s ideas before they ever saw the light of day. As he proudly recalled later, “We became friends and so I was the mid-wife for a lot of his theories. He would bounce them off me, you know, and so I understood information theory before it was ever published.” That might have been a mild boast on Oliver’s part, but given the few people Shannon let into even the periphery of his thinking, it was notable that Shannon talked with him about work at all.
John Pierce was another of the Bell Labs friends whose company Shannon shared in the off hours. At the Labs, Pierce “had developed a wide circle of devoted admirers, charmed by his wit and his lively mind.” He was Shannon’s mirror image in his thin figure and height—and in his tendency to become quickly bored of anything that didn’t intensely hold his interest. This extended to people. “It was quite common for Pierce to suddenly enter or leave a conversation or a meal halfway through,” wrote Jon Gertner. It was the by-product of a blazing fast mind. Early in his education, Pierce had so impressed the professor of his engineering class that he was promoted, mid-course, from student to teacher. At the Labs, Pierce acquired a similar reputation. He was known for having a knack for invention that was on par with the Labs’ best.
Shannon and Pierce were intellectual sparring partners in the way only two intellects of their kind could be. They traded ideas, wrote papers together, and shared countless books over the course of their tenures at Bell Labs. One story, from a speech Pierce gave, illustrates their collaborations:
One day I was talking casually with Claude Shannon, and he described to me in a few words the system a worker outside of the Bell Laboratories had devised. I didn’t pay much attention while he was talking, but something of what he had said stayed with me. Then, later in the day, I saw certain advantages of this new system. The next day I went to see Claude and told him that this was a fine idea. As I explained the advantages, he agreed, but he observed that the system I was describing wasn’t the one he had told me about at all. I had invented a new system by listening carelessly and pursuing my own thoughts.
Pierce told Shannon on numerous occasions that “he should write up this or that idea.” To which Shannon is said to have replied, with characteristic insouciance, “What does ‘should’ mean?”
Oliver, Pierce, and Shannon—a genius clique, each secure enough in his own intellect to find comfort in the company of the others. They shared a fascination with the emerging field of digital communication and cowrote a key paper explaining its advantages in accuracy and reliability. One contemporary remembered this about the three Bell Labs wunderkinds:
It turns out that there were three certified geniuses at BTL [Bell Telephone Laboratories] at the same time, Claude Shannon of information theory fame, John Pierce, of communication satellite and traveling wave amplifier fame, and Barney. Apparently the three of those people were intellectually INSUFFERABLE. They were so bright and capable, and they cut an intellectual swath through that engineering community, that only a prestige lab like that could handle all three at once.
Other accounts suggest that Shannon might not have been so “insufferable” as he was impatient. His colleagues remembered him as friendly but removed. To Maria, he confessed a frustration with the more quotidian elements of life at the Labs. “I think it made him sick,” she said. “I really do. That he had to do all that work while he was so interested in pursuing his own thing.”
Partly, it seems, the distance between Shannon and his colleagues was a matter of sheer processing speed. In the words of Brockway McMillan, who occupied the office next door to Shannon’s, “he had a certain type of impatience with the type of mathematical argument that was fairly common. He addressed problems differently from the way most people did, and the way most of his colleagues did. . . . It was clear that a lot of his argumentation was, let’s say, faster than his colleagues could follow.” What others saw as reticence, McMillan saw as a kind of ambient frustration: “He didn’t have much patience with people who weren’t as smart as he was.”
It gave him the air of a man in a hurry, perhaps too much in a hurry to be collegial. He was “a very odd man in so many ways. . . . He was not an unfriendly person,” observed David Slepian, another Labs colleague. Shannon’s response to colleagues who could not keep pace was simply to forget about them. “He never argued his ideas. If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people,” McMillan told Gertner.
George Henry Lewes once observed that “genius is rarely able to give an account of its own processes.” This seems to have been true of Shannon, who could neither explain himself to others, nor cared to. In his work life, he preferred solitude and kept his professional associations to a minimum. “He was terribly, terribly secretive,” remembered Moulton. Robert Fano, a later collaborator of Shannon, said, “he was not someone who would listen to other people about what to work on.” One mark of this, some observed, was how few of Shannon’s papers were coauthored.
Shannon wouldn’t have been the first genius with an inward-looking temperament, but even among the brains of Bell Labs, he was a man apart. “He wouldn’t have been in any other department successfully. . . . You would knock on the door and he would talk to you, but otherwise, he kept to himself,” McMillan said. Slepian would put his apartness still more colorfully: “My characterization of his smartness is that he would have been the world’s best con man if he had taken a turn in that direction.” (“He would have taken that as a big compliment,” his daughter later said.)
There was something else, too, something that might have kept him at a remove from even his close colleagues: Shannon was moonlighting. On the evenings he was at home, Shannon was at work on a private project. It had begun to crystallize in his mind in his graduate school days. He would, at various points, suggest different dates of provenance. But whatever the date on which the idea first implanted itself in his mind, pen hadn’t met paper in earnest until New York and 1941. Now this noodling was both a welcome distraction from work at Bell Labs and an outlet to the deep theoretical work he prized so much, and which the war threatened to foreclose. Reflecting on this time later, he remembered the flashes of intuition. The work wasn’t linear; ideas came when they came. “These things sometimes . . . one night I remember I woke up in the middle of the night and I had an idea and I stayed up all night working on that.”
To picture Shannon during this time is to see a thin man tapping a pencil against his knee at absurd hours. This isn’t a man on a deadline; it’s something more like a man obsessed with a private puzzle, one that is years in the cracking. “He would go quiet, very very quiet. But he didn’t stop working on his napkins,” said Maria. “Two or three days in a row. And then he would look up, and he’d say, ‘Why are you so quiet?’ ”
Napkins decorate the table, strands of thought and stray sections of equations accumulate around him. He writes in neat script on lined paper, but the raw material is everywhere. Eight years like this—scribbling, refining, crossing out, staring into a thicket of equations, knowing that, at the end of all that effort, they may reveal nothing. There are breaks for music and cigarettes, and bleary-eyed walks to work in the morning, but mostly it’s this ceaseless drilling. Back to the desk, where he senses, perhaps, that he is on to something significant, something even more fundamental than the master’s thesis that made his name—but what?