Shannon turned thirty-two in 1948. The conventional wisdom in mathematical circles had long held that thirty is the age by which a young mathematician ought to have accomplished his foremost work; the professional mathematician’s fear of aging is not so different from the professional athlete’s. “For most people, thirty is simply the dividing line between youth and adulthood,” writes John Nash biographer Sylvia Nasar, “but mathematicians consider their calling a young man’s game, so thirty signals something far more gloomy.” Shannon was two years late by that standard, but he had made it.
Roughly ten years of work had become seventy-seven pages of information theory, and the work had been worthwhile by all accounts. Shannon had won a small measure of fame and had established himself as a first-rate theoretical mind. His work was the springboard for that of others, a sign that he had laid some important foundations. He had made a name for himself within the demanding and insular world of Bell Labs. That year, 1948, would have transformed Shannon on those bases alone. But there was more than mathematics reshaping his life that fall.
Besides jousting with him on matters of the intellect, John Pierce played one other significant role in Claude Shannon’s life, in a matter of the heart: he was responsible, indirectly, for introducing Shannon to his future wife, Betty Moore, a young analyst at Bell Labs. Pierce was Moore’s immediate supervisor, and it was in the course of dropping by to see Pierce in 1948 that Shannon struck up a conversation with her. Taciturn though he might have been, Shannon had it in him to summon the courage to ask Betty out to dinner. That dinner led to a second, the second to a third, until they were dining together every night.
He charmed her, and they both seemed to share a sense of ironic detachment, a feeling that the world was frequently conspiring to make them chuckle. As their dates grew longer and more frequent, they split time between his West Village apartment and hers on East Eighteenth Street. There, the two shared their mutual loves: mathematics and music. “I played piano and he played clarinet,” she recalled, “and we’d come home from work, and we found some books of music that had two parts, and we’d enjoy playing together.”
Born on April 14, 1922, Betty was an only child. In the early part of her life, the family lived on Staten Island, but they later moved to Manhattan. Betty Moore’s mother and aunt had emigrated to America from Hungary, so the soundtrack of her childhood contained as much Hungarian as accented English. Like many immigrants, the family struggled to find a foothold in their adopted country, and they were struck hard by the Great Depression. Her father faced periods of unemployment, eventually finding a role on the support staff of the New York Times. Her mother found steadier work in the fur business, though she was forced to prematurely end her schooling to provide for the family.
Money was always tight. When the Depression hit, they nearly lost their home. A New Deal homeowners’ program saved the family from foreclosure, a moment that Betty never forgot. By her daughter’s account, “My mother was eternally grateful to FDR and to the New Deal and the protections FDR put in place. They managed to keep the house and survive.”
Betty attended Catholic schools, though, she was quick to add, not because of any particular religiosity on her parents’ part. Her mother was Catholic, her father Episcopalian, but they chose Catholic schools for Betty because the public school in their neighborhood had unexpectedly closed. Betty proved a gifted student, and by the time she was ready to graduate, several colleges offered her both admission and scholarships.
She had her heart set on Cornell, but the scholarship fell short of the full cost of tuition, and her parents could offer no help. So when a letter arrived offering a full scholarship to the New Jersey College for Women—along with a job offer—Betty wept. Now she’d be able to attend college close to home and even send a bit of money back to her parents. As her daughter, Peggy, recalled, “it changed her life.”
Betty Moore studied mathematics at the New Jersey College for Women (now Rutgers University’s Douglass College); like many colleges at the time, it was still recovering from the Depression. Enrollments and funding had both been cut, and a feeling of economic uncertainty lingered on campus. Yet by the time Moore was a sophomore, economic troubles had become comparatively trivial. America was at war, and the campus mobilized in support: “students and faculty formed relief organizations, rolled bandages and entered war production industries.”
Betty was matter-of-fact, whip-smart, and had a wry sense of humor. She was an avid reader, and those who knew her marked her out as unusually bright. Her choice of major was well suited to the times, and she “fortunately had good grades.” As she recalled, “at that point they were very much looking for math majors, particularly women, because the men were all in the service.” Bell Labs was among those companies on the search for any and all talented graduates in the field. As she neared graduation day, the Labs gave Betty “the best offer of any of the jobs I had been offered,” and she accepted.
She started work in the mathematics department, focusing on microwave research, and then moved to the fast-growing radar group. “Just working there was fascinating,” she recalled. And, “considering that the world was in a mess, we were very lucky.” She moved back home with her parents and continued to contribute to the household; Betty would support her parents in some way for the rest of their lives.
Of the Claude she knew in the early days, she would say that “he was very quiet and had a wonderful sense of humor.” Their courtship began just as Shannon was beginning to achieve a measure of fame for his information theory work, but his rising star seems not to have interfered with their early dating life. That’s partly because Shannon was consumed by affection for Betty. It had been seven years since the dissolution of his marriage to Norma, and just as before, the courtship moved efficiently. Betty and Claude met in the fall of 1948 and, by early 1949, Claude had proposed—in his “not very formal” way, as Betty recalled. She accepted, and on March 22, they were married. The wedding was a small affair; as Betty tells it, the only guest “we had from Claude’s family was his sister Catherine.” The newlyweds soon left the city and moved to Morristown, New Jersey, close to Bell Labs’ new facility in Murray Hill.
Nearly all who knew them testified to how good a match Betty was for Claude Shannon—in every sense. It wasn’t just the joy he found in her company, though he did. Betty and Claude became professional partners, as well. Albert Einstein famously said of his wife, Mileva Maric, “I need my wife. She solves all the mathematical problems for me.” Claude’s work was very much his own, but there’s no denying Betty’s help in bringing it to fruition; she became one of his closest advisers on mathematical matters. She looked up references, took down his thoughts, and, importantly, edited his written work.
Claude’s gifts were of the Einsteinian variety: a strong intuitive feel for the dimensions of a problem, with less of a concern for the step-by-step details. As he put it, “I think I’m more visual than symbolic. I try to get a feeling of what’s going on. Equations come later.” Like Einstein, he needed a sounding board, a role that Betty played perfectly. His colleague David Slepian said, “He didn’t know math very deeply. But he could invent whatever he needed.” Robert Gallager, another colleague, went a step further: “He had a weird insight. He could see through things. He would say, ‘Something like this should be true’ . . . and he was usually right. . . . You can’t develop an entire field out of whole cloth if you don’t have superb intuition.”
The trouble with that kind of intuition is that solutions to problems appear before the details and intermediary steps do. Shannon, like many an intuitive mind before him, loathed showing his work. So Betty, who could hold her own mathematically, became his scribe. She was also the first audience for many of his ideas—the most notable exception to the introverted policy of a man who, as she put it, “wouldn’t go out of his way to collaborate with other people.” Taking dictation, she would also offer her improvements and edits, and add historical references that occurred to her. In later life, when Claude’s memory would fail him about this or that reference to a mathematical paper, she would step in and remind him. As Betty put it, “some of his early papers and even later papers are in my handwriting, so called, and not in his, which confused people at first.” Confusing, perhaps—but also testament to one of the great mathematical marriages of our time: one that produced path-breaking work and lasted the rest of Claude’s life.