For decades, honors and recognitions arrived for Shannon from around the world. The world’s top universities conferred honorary degrees. Societies of all sizes bestowed certificates, commendations, and gold medals.
The boy from Gaylord was mostly amused by all the attention. As Betty Shannon later put it, “He was a very modest guy. He got a lot of awards but they never went to his head and he never talked about them.” Shannon put it this way:
I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can’t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.
Shannon’s indifference was on display for all to see: he had accumulated so many honorary degrees that he hung the doctoral hoods from a device that resembled a rotating tie rack (which, naturally, he had built with his own hands). Whether the awarding institutions would have found that treatment fitting or insulting, it speaks to the lightness with which Shannon took the work of being lauded.
Peggy’s account of those years gives the impression of parents trying to keep their home life normal in the face of their Claude’s fame in the mathematics world. “Then,” Peggy remembered, “the calls would come about the honorary degrees,” cracking the thin veneer.
Try as they might to downplay and laugh off many of his achievements, some honors made it clear even to a child that Claude was someone important—and that, as unassuming as he was, his work constituted something significant in the world. On the day before Christmas 1966, it was announced that President Lyndon B. Johnson would present Claude Shannon with the National Medal of Science, in honor of “brilliant contributions to the mathematical theories of communications and information processing.”
On February 6, 1967, the Shannons joined the assembled guests in the East Room of the White House, where President Johnson dedicated his remarks to “eleven men whose lifelong purpose has been to explore the great ocean of truth. Their achievements—and the work of other scientists—have lengthened man’s life, have eased his days, and have enriched our treasury of wisdom.” It was a proud day for the Shannon family, all of whom were in attendance. Peggy recalled that she argued with her mother over which dress to wear, but also remembered, as many a White House guest does, the feeling of significance conveyed simply by setting foot in the building. She remarked, channeling some of her father’s self-effacement, “I was seven, so I had the eyes of a seven-year-old, and it was just a pretty cool thing.”
LBJ gave the family the full Johnson treatment just after presenting the award, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s loud laugh spooked young Peggy into hiding behind her mother’s leg.
Among Shannon’s most cherished awards and honors were the ones that made him laugh. There was a miniature Greek temple, bearing the inscription “MASSACHVSETTS INSTITVTE OF JVGGLOLOGY” and featuring a clown juggling tiny replicas of Shannon’s honorary diplomas. And, from the close of his fellowship at Stanford, a very formal, university-sanctioned certificate—the bottom of which had been graffitied with the signatures of all the other fellows, in as large and boisterous a script as the space would allow. Shannon even found a way to wring comedy from accepting awards. Upon being invited to join the American Philosophical Society, he was sent a certificate that was an obvious facsimile of calligraphy. Tickled, Shannon hired an actual calligrapher to write a long reply accepting membership into the society.
Not even the Oxbridge style of high academic decorum could dent his flippancy. When he was awarded a visiting fellowship to All Souls College in Oxford in 1978, he had the opportunity of reuniting with John Pierce and Barney Oliver for the university’s Trinity term. The trio, along with their fellow Bell Labs alumnus and reunion organizer Rudi Kompfner, were expected to give a series of lectures on their topics of research and interest—artificial intelligence, information theory, and so on. Notes passed between Kompfner and Pierce testify to their concern about Shannon’s willingness to deliver the lectures: “to get something out of Claude may be the problem,” Kompfner wrote to Pierce.
Claude was pondering a serious problem, though—or at least, a serious problem for him. What emerged from the Oxford stint was one of the more curious papers of Shannon’s career. Frustrated by having to drive on the left side of the road, Shannon engineered a custom-built solution. “The Fourth-Dimensional Twist, or a Modest Proposal in Aid of the American Driver in England” opens with a tale of the woes of the American driver abroad:
An American driving in England is confronted with a wild and dangerous world. . . . With our long-ingrained driving habits the world seemed totally mad. Cars, bicycles and pedestrians would dart out from nowhere and we would always be looking in the wrong direction. The car was usually filled with curses from the men and with screams and hysterical laughter from the women as we careened from one narrow escape to another. The passengers were given to sudden involuntary motions—shielding the face or slamming on non-existent brakes. The turn indicator and windshield wiper controls were also reversed from American practice and we found ourselves signaling turns with the windshield wiper—fast for a right turn, slow for a left. The whole driving situation was not particularly improved by the narrowness of English streets and the high speed of English drivers. Nor was our inner security increased by the predilection of the English for building stone walls immediately adjacent to the roads.
Shannon proposed an idea that even he admitted sounded “grandiose and utterly impractical—the idle dream of a mathematician.” His solution was to create a fourth dimension, one that reversed perceptions of right and left:
How will we do this? In a word, with mirrors. If you hold your right hand in front of a mirror, the image appears as a left hand. If you view it in a second mirror, after two reflections it appears now as a right hand, and after three reflections again as a left hand, and so on. Our general plan is to encompass our American driver with mirror systems which reflect his view of England an odd number of times. Thus he sees the world about him not as it is but as it would be after a 180° fourth-dimensional rotation.
Finally, a series of adjustments to the steering system would translate the American driver’s motions into British English: turning the wheel left would make the car go right, and vice versa, et voilà.
Complete with drawings, figures, and schematics, the paper was, of course, written with tongue firmly in cheek. But it remains the most memorable record of Shannon’s time at Oxford. At more than 2,100 words, it was not simply a throwaway idea—it shows Shannon’s willingness to spend hours fleshing out the implications of a joke, as well as his imperturbable indifference to the honors that came his way. And it speaks, perhaps, to the minor anxieties of a world traveler who mainly found travel something to be tolerated—who would just as soon have brought his home with him, even if only as an optical illusion.
By the time the awards-related junkets began in earnest, the Shannons had three children, so each trip became a chance for the family to travel the world together. His daughter, Peggy, recalled, “he’d get an award from Israel and the whole family went on a six- or seven-week trip in the middle of the school year. We went to Israel and then we went to Egypt, Turkey, and England. . . . So I was pulled out of school for six weeks or something like that in order to do that.”
Shannon himself had mixed feelings about all of the travel. He was a homebody and an introvert, and more important, a less-than-adventurous eater. His tastes ran to home-cooked meat and potatoes, and the problem of finding the closest foreign equivalent caused him no small amount of anxiety. Peggy remembered that the Shannons rarely ate out, even in Massachusetts—so the prospect of couscous in Israel or raw fish in Japan was particularly fearsome to her father.
Nor did it help that public speaking increasingly terrified him, especially, it seems, as he grew further removed from the work that made his name. The confident, if occasionally scattershot, MIT lecturer had developed a crippling stage fright—driven less, it seems, by fear of the spotlight than by fear of having run out of interesting, intellectually rigorous subjects to talk about. For Shannon there would be little of the aging luminary’s pontifications and platitudes; the standard he generally set himself was hard mathematics or nothing.
Even sympathetic audiences and eponymous venues frightened him. In 1973, for instance, Shannon was invited to give the first Claude Shannon lecture in Ashkelon, Israel, for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Information Theory Society. “I have never seen such stage fright,” the mathematician Elwyn Berlekamp recalled. “It never would have occurred to me that anyone in front of friends could be so scared.” Shannon required extensive nerve calming in the wings and would only take the stage accompanied by a friend. Another attendee remembered, “He just felt that people were going to expect so much of him in this talk, and he was afraid that he didn’t have anything significant to say. Needless to say, he gave a fantastic talk, but in my mind . . . it showed me what a modest man he was.”
In response to another invitation from a friend, Shannon anticipated that he’d be asked to speak—and tried a preemptive strike: “Since our retirement, Betty doesn’t do windows and I don’t give talks.” Still, for all his anxieties about appearing in public, Shannon indulged in the trips and accepted the accolades, if only because Betty so enjoyed the chance to see the world.
In part, the invitations and recognitions kept pouring in because the technological developments of the 1970s had awakened the world to information theory’s importance. In the immediate aftermath of Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” said an MIT student of that era, Tom Kailath, “we always thought that information theory would never see practical implementation. In the old days, people studied Latin and Greek just as training for the mind.” In the same way, young engineers in the 1950s and ’60s mainly saw Shannon’s theory as “good training.”
And yet an increasingly digital world had begun to assimilate the codes whose existence Shannon had first identified. On September 5, 1977, the Voyager 1 probe set out for Jupiter and Saturn, fortified against error by one of those codes and capable of transmitting images of the gas giants across some 746 million miles of vacuum. In the same year, a pair of Israeli researchers, Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel, devised a data compression algorithm, built on Shannon’s coding work, that served as one of the critical backbones of later Internet and cellular communications systems. That Ziv had been a graduate student at MIT at the same time as Shannon was a faculty member was, by his own later acknowledgment, critical to firing his interest in the field.
Even as the scale of Shannon’s accomplishment became increasingly clear, “he didn’t like to boast,” remembered Arthur Lewbel.
But every now and then . . . I remember one time I was at his house, and he was showing me the program for an information theory conference. He just picked it up, showed it to me, and he pointed to the sessions. And the session was named Shannon Theory 1, and another session he pointed to was named Shannon Theory 2, and the sessions went up to Shannon Theory 5.
Naturally, talk of a Nobel Prize followed Shannon for much of his career. In 1959, he was nominated for the Nobel in physics, alongside Norbert Wiener. Instead, physicists Emilio Gino Segrè and Owen Chamberlain garnered that year’s award for discovering the antiproton. The nomination for Shannon and Wiener was regarded as a bit of a long shot, but the mere fact of a nomination reveals what Shannon’s contemporaries thought of him. The problem with awarding Shannon the Nobel was, in part, structural: mathematics lacked a dedicated Nobel category of its own, a fact that had always been something of a chip on the math world’s shoulder. Shannon himself said as much: “You know, there’s no Nobel in mathematics, although I think there should be.” The mathematicians who had won, including John Nash and Max Born, had won in fields like economics or physics; Bertrand Russell won in literature. Shannon’s work had cut across several disciplines, but it was difficult to shoehorn into any Nobel field; the prize would not be in his future.
In 1985, though, the Shannons received a call, not from Stockholm, but from Kyoto. Claude had been selected as the first-ever winner of the Kyoto Prize in Basic Science, an award endowed by the billionaire Kazuo Inamori. Inamori was a Japanese applied chemist who founded the multinational Kyocera and later rescued Japan Airlines from bankruptcy. He was an engineer by training, a Zen Buddhist by choice, and a business turnaround artist by reputation. He was a student of management philosophy, which, along with his Buddhism, might explain why the Kyoto Prize’s founding letter reads like a curious mix of a spiritual text and a shareholder update:
After a quarter of a century of relentless and painstaking effort, Kyocera’s annual sales have, by the grace of God, grown to 230 billion yen, with pre-tax profits of 53 billion yen. . . . I have decided on this occasion to create the Kyoto Prize. . . .
Those worthy of the Kyoto Prize will be people who have, as have we at Kyocera, worked humbly and devotedly, sparing no effort to seek perfection in their chosen professions. They will be individuals who are sensitive to their own human fallibility and who thereby hold a deeply rooted reverence for excellence. . . .
The future of humanity can be assured only through a balance of scientific progress and spiritual depth. Though today’s technology-based civilization is advancing rapidly, there is a deplorable lag in inquiry into our spiritual nature. I believe that the world is composed of mutual dichotomies—pluses and minuses, such as the yin and the yang or darkness and light. Only through the awareness and nourishment of both sides of these dualisms can we achieve a complete and stable equilibrium. . . . It is my sincere hope that the Kyoto Prize may serve to encourage the cultivation of both our scientific and spiritual sides.
In time, the Kyoto would acquire a measure of prestige, in part by conspicuously styling itself as a competitor to the Nobel. Press releases announcing the prize winners would begin: “The Kyoto Prize, alongside the Nobel Prize one of the world’s highest honors for the lifetime achievement of outstanding personalities in the fields of culture and science, is being awarded this year to . . .” It even managed to anticipate the Nobel on a number of occasions, honoring scientists who, years later, strained to avoid repeating themselves at their laureate lectures in Stockholm.
In presentation, too, the Kyoto ceremony would reach for Nobel-like flourish and flair, with the Japanese imperial family lending itself to the proceedings. And perhaps betraying its founder’s sense for untapped business opportunities, the Kyoto’s categories were broad enough to accommodate the fields the Nobel excluded—including mathematics and engineering. The Nobel may have had an eighty-four-year head start, but the Kyoto intended to give it a run for its money.
The Kyoto was a significant triumph for Shannon and represented, in many ways, his career’s crowning recognition. Shannon, as usual, was nervous about the trip, and especially apprehensive about Japanese food. But he was joined by both Betty and his sister, Catherine, who still shared the family passion for math: she was a professor of mathematics at Murray State University in Kentucky. Accompanied as he would be, in Peggy’s words, by “two strong women,” he agreed to travel to Japan to accept the award.
Shannon’s Kyoto Prize had a lasting benefit that outlived the award proceedings: he was required to deliver a laureate lecture, one of his last and longest public statements, “Development of Communication and Computing, and My Hobby.” Shannon began the lecture by discussing history itself—or rather, the problem of how history was taught in his home country:
I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan, but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons and Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion.
One category of innovation he singled out for special mention: the discoveries of science “are wonderful achievements in themselves, but would not affect the life of the common man without the intermediate efforts of engineers and inventors—people like Edison, Bell and Marconi.” Shannon marveled at the progress of the twentieth century, before which “people lived much as they had centuries before, a largely agrarian society with little mobility or distant communication.” He cited the spinning jenny, Watt’s steam engine, the telegraph, the electric light, the radio, and the automobile—all less than two centuries old and each one transformative. That human life had been so utterly reshaped over a handful of life spans was largely, he believed, the work of engineers.
Though he was rarely given to public self-reflection, Shannon recalled the day when, as a young engineering student, he was asked to purchase a slide rule, a log-log-duplex, “the biggest they had.” Looking back, he remarked on how quaint the device seemed now. He had with him on stage a handheld transistor computer made in Japan, and it “does everything my log-log-duplex did, and much more—and out to ten decimal places instead of three.”
Between the slide rule and the handheld computer—between the room-sized differential analyzer and the Apple II sitting on his desk at home—Shannon’s career had spanned a computing revolution. At points, “the intellectual progress in computers . . .was so rapid that they were obsolete even before they were finished.”
In a room of Japanese royalty and distinguished guests, Shannon was giving an all-too-brief survey course of computing history, down to the point at which Shannon himself entered the story. It was the summation of a lifetime’s work on machines that could communicate, think, reason, and act, and on the theoretical architecture that made all of it possible. But computing was not only a central thread of his life’s work. As the lecture’s title suggested, it was also, always, his hobby—or, as he translated the word for his audience, his shumi. “Building devices like chess-playing machines and juggling robots, even as a ‘shumi,’ might seem a ridiculous waste of time and money,” Shannon admitted. “But I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.”
What might proliferate from such curiosities as Endgame and Theseus?
I have great hopes in this direction for machines that will rival or even surpass the human brain. This area, known as artificial intelligence, has been developing for some thirty or forty years. It is now taking on commercial importance. For example, within a mile of MIT, there are seven different corporations devoted to research in this area, some working on parallel processing. It is difficult to predict the future, but it is my feeling that by 2001 AD we will have machines which can walk as well, see as well, and think as well as we do.
But even before this convergence of human and machine intelligence had come to pass, machines were still a rich source of analogies for understanding the subtleties of our own minds:
Incidentally, a communication system is not unlike what is happening right here. I am the source and you are the receiver. The translator is the transmitter who is applying a complicated operation to my American message to make it suitable for Japanese ears. This transformation is difficult enough with straight factual material, but becomes vastly more difficult with jokes and double entendres. I could not resist the temptation to include a number of these to put the translator on his mettle. Indeed, I am planning to take a tape of his translation to a second translator, and have it translated back into English.
We information theorists get a lot of laughs this way.