“Geniuses are the luckiest”: W. H. Auden, “Foreword,” in Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings (New York: Knopf, 1964), xv.
“This is—ridiculous”: Anthony Ephremides, “Claude E. Shannon 1916–2001,” IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, March 2001.
“as if Newton had showed up”: John Horgan, “Claude E. Shannon: Unicyclist, Juggler, and Father of Information Theory,” Scientific American, January 1990, 22B.
“the Magna Carta”: Ibid., 22A.
“a bomb”: John Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19, no. 1 (1973): 4.
“a fearsome thing”: Philip McCord Morse, In at the Beginnings: A Physicist’s Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 121.
“became the basic concept”: Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 49.
“possibly the most”: Howard Gardner, quoted in “MIT Professor Claude Shannon Dies; Was Founder of Digital Communications,” MIT News, February 27, 2001, newsoffice.mit.edu/2001/shannon.
“the operations of genius”: Harold Arnold, quoted in Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), 121.
“People did very well”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors August 7, 2014.
“an analysis of some of the fundamental properties”: Letter from Claude Shannon to Vannevar Bush, February 16, 1939, Claude Elwood Shannon Papers, Library of Congress.
“How he got that insight”: Robert Fano, quoted in W. Mitchell Waldrop, “Claude Shannon: Reluctant Father of the Digital Age,” MIT Technology Review, July 1, 2001, www.technologyreview.com/s/401112/claude-shannon-reluctant-father-of-the-digital-age.
“a mote of dust”: Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994), 6.
“bandwagon”: Claude Shannon, “The Bandwagon,” IRE Transactions—Information Theory 2, no. 1 (1956): 3.
“XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ”: Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1992), 14. The paper was originally printed in Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July, October 1948): 379–423, 623–56.
“53‡‡†”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug,” in The Gold-Bug and Other Tales, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1991), 100.
leather straps: Delbert Trew, “Barbed Wire Telegraph Lines Brought Gossip and News to Farm and Ranch,” Farm Collector, September 2003. See also David B. Sicilia, “How the West Was Wired,” Inc., June 1997.
“Shannon-Wolf Nuptials” . . . “If anything is wanted”: Otsego County Times, August 27, 1909.
“wedding gown of white satin”: Otsego County Times, August 27, 1936. The reference is to the wedding of Mabel’s daughter, at which she wore her mother’s dress.
“Mr. Shannon, the groom”: Otsego County Times, August 27, 1909.
“Something which should be found”: C. E. Shannon, advertisement, Otsego County Herald and Times, November 1, 1912.
“He would sometimes help me”: Shannon, interviewed by Donald J. Albers, 1990.
“glowing recommendations”: Ibid.
“At a meeting”: Reprinted in “A Brief History of Gaylord Community Schools—1920 to 1944,” Otsego County Herald Times, May 2, 1957, goo.gl/oVb0pT.
Library Board: “Mrs. Mabel Shannon Dies in Chicago,” Otsego County Herald Times, December 27, 1945.
“The fact that”: Perry Francis Powers and H. G. Cutler, A History of Northern Michigan and Its People (Chicago: Lewis, 1912), iv.
ten pins: H. C. McKinley, “Step Back in Time: A New County Seat and the First Newspaper,” Gaylord Herald Times, reprinted January 6, 2016, www.petoskeynews.com/gaylord/featured-ght/top-gallery/step-back-in-time-a-new-county-seat-and-the/article_88155b9f-0965-56c2-b2ce-85456427fc70.html.
“WISCONSIN GIRL,” “A woman smoking” . . . “LUMBERJACK DIES” . . . “VERN MATTS LOSES FINGER,” “MEETING CALLED TO DISCUSS ARTICHOKES” . . . “splotches of silver”: Otsego County Herald and Times, April 28, 1916; September 20, 1923; September 27, 1923; Otsego County Herald Times, November 18, 1926; September 27, 1928; September 13, 1928; Otsego County Herald and Times, September 27, 1923.
“the first business”: Otsego County Herald Times, October 22, 1969.
“Norbert always felt”: Paul A. Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” in The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium in Honor of the 100th Anniversary of Norbert Wiener’s Birth, October 8–14, 1994, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, ed. David Jerison, I. M. Singer, and Daniel W. Stroock (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1997), 38.
“one of Gaylord’s most popular girls”: Otsego County Times, August 27, 1936.
“She was a model student”: Shannon, interviewed by Albers, 1990.
“A Poor Boy”: Reprinted in “A Brief History of Gaylord Community Schools—1920 to 1944,” Otsego County Herald Times, May 2, 1957, goo.gl/oVb0pT.
“Some names” . . . “boys in those grades”: Letter from Shannon to Virginia Howe, May 2, 1983, Shannon Papers.
“I think one”: Claude Shannon, interviewed by Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“always seems a little dull”: Letter from Shannon to Irene Angus, August 8, 1952, Shannon Papers.
“first place”: Otsego County Herald Times, April 17, 1930.
“dirt, settlings, and foul matter”: U.S. Patent No. 407,130.
“As a young boy”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“He and my brother”: Quoted in Julie Kettlewell, “Gaylord Honors ‘Father to the Information Theory,’ ” Otsego Herald Times, September 3, 1998.
“Claude was the brains”: Quoted in Melinda Cerny, “Engineering Industry Honors Shannon, His Hometown,” Otsego Herald Times, September 3, 1998.
John Ogden: Jack Harpster, John Ogden, The Pilgrim (1609–1682): A Man of More than Ordinary Mark (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2006), 209.
“8. Have you earned”: Claude Shannon Alumnus File, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
“the century to come”: Quoted in James Fraser Cocks and Cathy Abernathy, Pictorial History of Ann Arbor, 1824–1974 (Ann Arbor: Michigan Historical Collections/Bentley Historical Library Ann Arbor Sesquicentennial Committee, 1974), 54.
“I am not at all”: Ibid., 92.
“enrollments”: Anne Duderstadt, “Engineering,” in The University of Michigan: A Photographic Saga, umhistory.dc.umich.edu/history/publications/photo_saga/media/PDFs/12%20Engineering.pdf.
“with his characteristic chuckle”: Hillard A. Sutin, “A Tribute to Mortimer E. Cooley,” Michigan Technic, March 1935, 103.
“Gentlemen, if you could”: Ibid., 105.
“surprised their visitors”: Michigan Alumnus 22 (1916): 463.
“I wasn’t really quite sure”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“A feature of all meetings”: F. W. Owens and Helen B. Owens, “Mathematics Clubs—Junior Mathematics Club, University of Michigan,” American Mathematical Monthly 43, no. 10 (December 1936): 636.
“Claude Shannon has been made”: “Gaylord Locals,” Otsego County Herald Times, November 15, 1934.
“Breakfast at the dining hall”: 1934 Michiganensian, ed. C. Wallace Graham et al. (Ann Arbor, 1934), 364.
“removes his legs”: Ibid., 370–72.
“He laughed in small explosions”: Maria Moulton-Barrett, Graphotherapy (New York: Trafford, 2005), 84.
first publication credit: Shannon, “Problems and Solutions—E58,” American Mathematical Monthly 41, no. 3 (March 1934): 191–92.
“problems believed to be new”: Otto Dunkel, H. L. Olson, and W. F. Cheney, Jr., “Problems and Solutions,” American Mathematical Monthly 41, no. 3 (March 1934): 188–89.
“In the following division”: R. M. Sutton, “Problems for Solution,” American Mathematical Monthly 40, no. 8 (October 1933): 491.
“In two concentric circles”: G. R. Livingston, “Problems for Solution,” American Mathematical Monthly 41, no. 6 (June 1934): 390.
after his undergraduate days were over: With his MIT admission in hand, Shannon would spend the summer of 1936 in Ann Arbor, “taking extracurricular work”; Otsego County Herald Times, August 6, 1936.
“I pushed hard for that job”: Shannon, interviewed by Albers, 1990.
“it ran over”: Quoted in G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 26.
“the man who” . . . “the general of physics”: J. D. Ratcliff, “Brains,” Collier’s, January 17, 1942; “Vannevar Bush: General of Physics,” Time, April 3, 1944.
“an apple drops from a tree”: Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (New York: Morrow, 1970), 181.
“the towing of one car”: Harold Hazen, quoted in David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 151.
“You and I”: Silvanus P. Thomson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs (London: Macmillan, 1910), 1:98.
“Go, wondrous creature”: Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” 2.19–20; epigraph to William Thomson, “Essay on the Figure of the Earth,” Kelvin Collection, University of Glasgow.
“calculation of so methodical a kind”: Thomson, “The Tides: Evening Lecture to the British Association at the Southampton Meeting, August 25, 1882,” in Scientific Papers, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: Collier & Son, 1910), 30:307.
“I would construct a machine”: Quoted in A. Ben Clymer, “The Mechanical Analog Computers of Hannibal Ford and William Newell,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 15, no. 2 (1993): 23.
Hannibal Ford was not the first: For instance, an earlier integrator was developed by Arthur Pollen for the British navy but was not widely adopted. See Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era (Barnsley, England: Seaforth, 2008), 53ff.
“a marvel of precision”: Quoted in Karl L. Wildes and Nilo A. Lindgren, A Century of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, 1882–1982 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 87.
“By turning the nut”: Daniel C. Stillson, U.S. Patent 126,161, “Improvement in Pipe Wrenches,” U.S. Patent Office, 1872 (an example of a patent that Bush may have used for this exercise).
“A man learns”: John Perry, The Calculus for Engineers (London: Edward Arnold, 1897), 5, cited in Larry Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer,” Technology and Culture 27, no. 1 (1986): 63–95.
“well-stocked with clay”: Benchara Branford, A Study of Mathematical Education (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), viii, cited in Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer.”
“uncertain always”: Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 64.
“It was a fearsome thing”: Morse, In at the Beginnings, 121.
“in calculating the scattering”: D. R. Hartree, “The Bush Differential Analyzer and its Applications,” Nature 146 (September 7, 1940): 320.
“still interpreted mathematics”: Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer,” 95.
“It is an analogue machine”: Quoted in Zachary, Endless Frontier, 49.
“Institute folklore”: Fred Hapgood, Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technical Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 61.
“efficiency and avoidance of lost motion”: John Ripley Freeman, “Study No. 7 for New Buildings for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections, libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/freeman.
“an electrical switch”: James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 173.
“As a material machine”: W. E. Johnson, “The Logical Calculus,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 1 (1892): 3.
blue-eyed and left-handed: For this example, and for our discussion of Boolean logic in general, we are indebted to Paul J. Nahin, The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), esp. 45–47.
“(x + y)’ = x’y’”: This particular law was one of those identified by Augustus De Morgan, another important contributor to formal logic.
“It’s not so much”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxvi.
“I think I had more fun”: Ibid.
“any circuit”: Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938): 471.
Consider a problem: This example is derived from INTOSAI Standing Committee on IT Audit, “1 + 1 = 1: A Tale of Genius,” IntoIT 18 (2003): 56.
“possibly the most important” . . . “One of the greatest” . . . “The most important” . . . “Monumental”: Gardner, quoted in “MIT Professor Claude Shannon Dies”; Solomon W. Golomb, “Retrospective: Claude E. Shannon (1916–2001),” Science, April 20, 2001, 455; William Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005), 20; Marvin Minsky, quoted in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xix.
“became the basic concept”: Isaacson, The Innovators, 49.
“an annus mirabilis”: Ibid., 38.
“an all-or-none device”: John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” in The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, ed. Brian Randell (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1973), 362.
“Years ago”: Hapgood, Up the Infinite Corridor, 11.
“Skin Effect Resistance,” etc.: Victor J. Decorte, “Skin Effect Resistance Ratio of a Circular Loop of Wire” (MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1929), hdl.handle.net/1721.1/81515; Burdett P. Cottrell, “An Investigation of Two Methods of Measuring the Acceleration of Rotating Machinery” (MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1929), hdl.handle.net/1721.1/85720; R. A. Swan and W. F. Bartlett, “Three Mechanisms of Breakdown of Pyrex Glass” (BS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1929), hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49611; James Sophocles Dadakis, “A Plan for Remodeling an Industrial Power Plant” (BS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1930), hdl.handle.net/1721.1/51558; Herbert E. Korb et al., “A Proposal to Electrify a Section of the Boston and Maine Railroad Haverhill Division” (MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1933), hdl.handle.net/1721.1/10560.
“What’s your secret”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxxii.
“I don’t happen to be”: Ibid., xxviii.
“I am convinced”: Letter from R. H. Smith to Karl Compton, April 11, 1939, Office of the President Records, MIT Archive, cited in Erico Marui Guizzo, “The Essential Message: Claude Shannon and the Making of Information Theory” (MS diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003), 13.
“Somehow I doubt”: Letter from Compton to Smith, April 13, 1939, Office of the President Records, MIT Archive, cited in Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 13.
A 1939 photo: Norma Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York: Nation Books, 2003), 213.
“a decidedly unconventional type”: Letter from Bush to E. B. Wilson, December 15, 1938, Vannevar Bush Papers, Library of Congress.
“Bush believed Shannon”: Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 21.
brief notice: “Youthful Instructor Wins Noble Award,” New York Times, January 24, 1940.
Back in Michigan: “Institute Reports on Claude Shannon,” Otsego County Herald Times, February 8, 1940.
“I have a sneaking suspicion”: Letter from Shannon to Bush, December 13, 1939, Shannon Papers.
“queer algebra”: Letter from Vannevar Bush to Barbara Burks, January 5, 1938, Bush Papers.
“In these days”: Quoted in Zachary, Endless Frontier, 70.
“fittest families”: Quoted in Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris 2, no. 2 (1986): 258.
mailed state legislators: Philip K. Wilson, “Harry Laughlin’s Eugenic Crusade to Control the ‘Socially Inadequate’ in Progressive Era America,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 1 (2002): 49.
a Nazi poster: Brenda Jo Brueggeman, Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 145.
“biochemical deficiencies,” etc.: Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office,” 239.
“Sometimes a father”: C. B. Davenport, Naval Officers: Their Heredity and Development (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1919), 29, quoted in Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office.”
“Thousands of stars”: Frances Williston Burks, Barbara’s Philippine Journey (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book, 1921), 25.
“surely Shannon is gifted”: Letter from Burks to Bush, January 10, 1938, Bush Papers.
“To advise a youth like Shannon”: Quoted in Robert Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon,” IEEE Global History Network, July 28, 1982, www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Claude_E._Shannon.
“No work has been done”: Shannon, “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 920.
“Although I looked”: Letter from Shannon to Bush, February 16, 1939, Bush Papers.
“Much of the power”: Shannon, “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 895.
“genes are carried”: Ibid., 892–93.
“My theory has to do with”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxvii.
“he did not even know”: Letter from Vannevar Bush to E. B. Wilson, December 15, 1938, Bush Papers.
“very suitable” . . . “very much impressed” . . . “This, I feel strongly”: Letter from Lowell J. Reed to Halbert L. Dunn, April 9, 1940, Bush Papers; letter from Dunn to Bush, April 19, 1940, Bush Papers; letter from Bush to Shannon, January 27, 1939, Bush Papers.
“I had a good time”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“few scientists”: Letter from Burks to Bush, January 20, 1939, Bush Papers.
“I doubt very much”: Letter from Bush to Shannon, January 27, 1939, Bush Papers.
“did not need to corrupt”: Robert Gallager, personal communication, July 1, 2016.
“After I had found the answers” . . . “Too lazy”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” xxviii, xxvii.
ranked Shannon: James F. Crow, “Shannon’s Brief Foray into Genetics,” Genetics 159, no. 3 (2001): 915–17.
“that the work of all three”: Crow, “Notes to ‘An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics,’ ” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 921.
“Dear Dr. Bush”: Letter from Shannon to Bush, February 16, 1939, Shannon Papers.
“Real life mathematics”: Bernard Beauzamy, “Real Life Mathematics,” lecture, Dublin Mathematical Society, February 2001, scmsa.eu/archives/BB_real_life_maths_2001.htm.
“unpredictable, irrational”: Moulton-Barrett, Graphotherapy, 90.
“Why don’t you come out here”: Norma Barzman, interviewed by the authors, December 21, 2014.
“Christ-like”: Quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 121.
“We spoke to each other”: Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist, 378.
“How can you” . . . “big trouble” . . . “was so loving”: Norma Barzman, interviewed by the authors, December 21, 2014.
denied them a room: Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 22.
“I did not”: Letter from Shannon to Bush, February 16, 1940, Bush Papers.
“Well, I applied”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“light-sensing reader system”: Bradley O’Neill, “Dead Medium: The Comparator; the Rapid Selector,” www.deadmedia.org/notes/1/017.html.
“The only point I have in mind”: Bush to Shannon, June 7, 1940. Vannevar Bush Papers, Library of Congress.
“a very careful and formal person . . . rather frowned on”: “Obituary: Thornton Carl Fry,” American Astronomical Society, January 1, 1991.
“Had I ever read”: Thornton C. Fry, interviewed by Deirdre M. La Porte, Henry O. Pollak, and G. Baley Price, January 3–4, 1981, 4.
“was where the future . . . the country’s intellectual utopia . . . the crown jewel”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1.
“to consider what occurred”: Ibid., 5.
“the method of”: “Improvement in Telegraphy,” Patent Number US 174465 A
“carry on scientific research”: Walter Gifford, “The Prime Incentive,” Bell Laboratories Records, vols. 1 and 2 (September 1925–September 1926), 18.
“fundamental questions of physics”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 27.
“When I first came”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors, August 7, 2014.
“a fairyland company”: Thornton C. Fry, interviewed by La Porte, Pollak, and Price, January 3–4, 1981, 10.
“wraith-like and slow-moving . . . an almost spectral presence” . . . “he was allowed”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 28, 30.
“I had the freedom to do anything I wanted”: Shannon, interviewed by Albers, 1990.
“Though the United States holds” . . . “The typical mathematician”: Fry, “Industrial Mathematics,” Bell Systems Technical Journal 20, no. 3 (July 1941): 256, 258.
“pathetically ignorant of mathematics”: Quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 122.
“Mathematicians are queer people”: Thornton C. Fry, interviewed by La Porte, Pollak, and Price, January 3–4, 1981, 55.
“our principle”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors, August 7, 2014.
“there was nothing”: Thornton C. Fry, interviewed by La Porte, Pollak, and Price, January 3–4, 1981, 56.
“I was in the mathematics research group”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
exclusively by last names: Thornton C. Fry, interviewed by La Porte, Pollak, and Price, January 3–4, 1981, 11.
“There are a number of relays”: Shannon, “A Theorem on Color Coding,” Bell Laboratories, Memorandum 40-130-153, July 8, 1940.
“The Use of the Lakatos-Hickman Relay”: Shannon, “The Use of the Lakatos-Hickman Relay in a Subscriber Sender,” Bell Laboratories, Memorandum 40-130-179, August 3, 1940.
“I got quite a kick”: Claude Shannon to Vannevar Bush. June 5, 1940. Vannevar Bush Papers, Library of Congress.
“a man of extraordinary brilliancy”: Norbert Wiener to J. R. Kline, April 10, 1941. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA.
“Mr. Shannon is one of the ablest graduates”: H. B. Phillips cable to M. Morse, October 21, 1940.
“He sees before him”: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 57.
“the smartest person”: Letter from Shannon to William Aspray, October 27, 1987, Shannon Papers.
“It is as if a wall”: Hermann Weyl, Space—Time—Matter, 4th ed., trans. Henry L. Brose (New York: Dover, 1950), ix.
“the fluctuations”: Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 32.
“I poured tea”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 121.
“Your husband”: Norma Barzman, interviewed by the authors, December 21, 2014.
“The story is”: Arthur Lewbel, “A Personal Tribute to Claude Shannon,” www2.bc.edu/~lewbel/Shannon.html.
“and he usually would walk along”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“A kind of guilt or depression”: Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, reprint ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 165.
“Turn off the moon”: Sam Coslow, “Turn Off the Moon,” performed by Teddy Grace on Turn on that Red Hot Heat, rerelease, Hep Records, 1997.
“You know where”: Norma Barzman, interviewed by the authors, December 21, 2014.
“America stands at the crossroads”: Franklin Roosevelt, Proclamation 2425—Selective Service Registration, September 16, 1940.
“Things were moving fast”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“if you can make yourself more useful”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“I think he did the work”: Maria Moulton-Barrett, interviewed by the authors, January 21, 2016.
“There were those who protested”: Bush, Pieces of the Action, 31–32.
“requirements of military training”: Neva Reynolds. “Letter to Claude Shannon.” February 10, 1941.
“chopping wood”: Mina Rees, “Warren Weaver,” in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, vol. 57 (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1987), 494.
“I didn’t know”: Warren Weaver, “Careers in Science,” in Listen to Leaders in Science, ed. Albert Love and James Saxon Childers (Atlanta: Tupper & Love/David McKay, 1965), 276.
“I think that God”: Warren Weaver, Science and Imagination: Selected Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 111.
“I had a good capacity”: Quoted in Rees, “Warren Weaver,” 501.
“Do not overestimate science”: Warren Weaver, “Four Pieces of Advice to Young People,” in The Project Physics Course Reader: Concepts of Motion, ed. Gerald Holton et al. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 22.
epicure enough: Thornton C. Fry, interviewed by La Porte, Pollak, and Price, January 3–4, 1981, 95.
“At first thought”: David A. Mindell, “Automation’s Finest Hour: Bell Labs and Automatic Control in WWII,” IEEE Control Systems 15 (1995): 72.
“I found myself”: Quoted in Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 103–4.
“if my potentiometer”: Quoted in Glenn Zorpette, “Parkinson’s Gun Director,” IEEE Spectrum 26, no. 4 (1989): 43.
“I think England”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“The wartime efforts”: Mindell, “Automation’s Finest Hour,” 78.
“special case of the transmission”: R. B. Blackman, H. W. Bode, and C. E. Shannon, “Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems,” Summary Technical Report of Division 7, NDRC Vol. 1: Gunfire Control, ed. Harold Hazen (Washington, DC: Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Defense Research Committee, 1946).
“He did some stunning work”: Warren Weaver to Vannevar Bush, October 24, 1949. Bush Papers.
“For a time”: Letter from Warren Weaver to Vannevar Bush, October 24, 1949, Bush Papers.
“This has not been”: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945.
“a warren of testing labs” . . . “a six-day workweek”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 26, 63.
“It was a war”: Fred Kaplan, “Scientists at War,” American Heritage 34, no. 4 (June 1983): 49.
“The attitude of many”: J. Barkley Rosser, “Mathematics and Mathematicians in World War II,” in A Century of Mathematics in America, Part 1, ed. Peter Duren (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1988), 303.
“He couldn’t care less” . . . “He said he hated it”: Maria Moulton-Barrett, interviewed by the authors, January 21, 2016.
“those were busy times”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“insisted to his dying day”: Rosser, “Mathematics and Mathematicians,” 304.
“Such an image”: Colin B. Burke, It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s–1960s. United States Cryptologic History, Special Series, Vol. 6, Center For Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002.
“Early in 1944”: Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, vol. 3 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 11.
“some forty racks”: Christopher H. Sterling, “Churchill and Intelligence—SIGSALY: Beginning the Digital Revolution,” Finest Hour 149 (Winter 2010–11): 31.
“rather like Rimsky-Korsakov’s”: David Kahn, How I Discovered World War II’s Greatest Spy and Other Stories of Intelligence and Code (Boca Raton, FL: Auerbach, 2014), 147.
“Accept distortion for security”: Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks (Chicago: Stop Smiling Books, 2011), 63.
“Members working on the job”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 247.
“It worked”: Ibid., 312.
“At a recent world fair”: Bush, “As We May Think.”
“Phrt fdygui”: Sterling, “Churchill and Intelligence,” 34.
“not a lot of laboratories”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“a very down to earth discipline”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“Here [Turing] met a person”: Hodges, Alan Turing, 314.
“I think Turing had” . . . “We talked not at all”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“I reached New York” . . . “I had been intending”: Alan Turing, “Alan Turing’s Report from Washington DC, November 1942.”
“incomplete alliance”: Andrew Hodges, “Alan Turing as UK-USA Link, 1942 Onwards,” Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook, www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/ukusa.html.
“I am persuaded”: Turing, “Alan Turing’s Report from Washington DC, November 1942.”
“we would talk about”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“Well, back in ’42” . . . “a very, very impressive guy”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“While there we went over”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“The ancient art of mathematics”: Gareth Cook, “The Singular Mind of Terry Tao,” New York Times, July 24, 2015.
“There was a bedroom” . . . “He would find these common denominators”: Maria Moulton-Barrett, interviewed by the authors, January 21, 2016.
“Barney was an intellect”: John Minck, “Inside HP: A Narrative History of Hewlett-Packard from 1939–1990,” www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/john_minck/inside_hp_03.htm.
“If the prospect of building devices”: Thomas Perkins, Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (New York: Gotham, 2007), 72.
“the world’s first”: Lawrence Fisher, “Bernard M. Oliver Is Dead at 79; Led Hewlett-Packard Research,” New York Times, November 28, 1995.
“We became friends”: Arthur L. Norberg, “An Interview with Bernard More Oliver,” Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Processing, August 9, 1985.
“One day I was talking casually”: John Pierce, “Creative Thinking,” lecture, 1951.
cowrote a key paper: Bernard More Oliver, John Pierce, and Claude Shannon, “The Philosophy of PCM,” Proceedings of the IRE 36, no. 11 (November 1948): 1324–31.
“It turns out”: Minck, “Inside HP.”
“I think it made him sick”: Maria Moulton-Barrett, interviewed by the authors, January 21, 2016.
113–14 “he had a certain type of impatience”: Brockway McMillan, interviewed by the authors, January 4, 2016.
“a very odd man”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 132.
“He never argued”: Ibid., 138.
“genius is rarely able”: George Henry Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1901), 98.
“He was terribly, terribly secretive”: Maria Moulton-Barrett, interviewed by the authors, January 21, 2016.
“he was not someone”: Robert Fano, interviewed by the authors, October 23, 2015.
“He wouldn’t have been”: Brockway McMillan, interviewed by the authors, January 4, 2016.
“My characterization of his smartness”: Quoted in William Poundstone, How to Predict the Unpredictable: The Art of Outsmarting Almost Anyone (London: Oneworld, 2014).
“He would have taken that”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“These things sometimes”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“He would go quiet”: Maria Moulton-Barrett, interviewed by the authors, January 21, 2016.
“Repeat, please”: Quoted in Samuel Carter, Cyrus Field: Man of Two Worlds (New York: Putnam, 1968), 167–68. See also Arthur C. Clarke, Voice Across the Sea: The Story of Deep Sea Cable-Laying, 1858–1958 (London: Muller, 1958).
“Down to the dark”: Rudyard Kipling, “The Deep Sea Cables,” in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1922), quoted in Clarke, Voice Across the Sea.
“nothing so much”: “The Atlantic Telegraph Expedition,” Times (London), July 15, 1858.
“The very thought”: Thomson, The Life of William Thomson, 1:362, quoted in Clarke, Voice Across the Sea.
“is no longer”: E. O. Wildman Whitehouse, “Report on a Series of Experimental Observations on Two Lengths of Submarine Electric Cable, Containing, in the Aggregate, 1,125 Miles of Wire, Being the Substance of a Paper Read Before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at Glasgow, Sept. 14th, 1855,” Brighton, 1855, 3, quoted in Bruce J. Hunt, “Scientists, Engineers, and Wildman Whitehouse: Measurement and Credibility in Early Cable Telegraphy,” British Journal for the History of Science 29, no. 2 (1996): 158.
“a fiction”: E. O. Wildman Whitehouse, “The Law of Squares—Is It Applicable or Not to the Transmission of Signals in Submarine Circuits?,” Athenaeum, August 30, 1856, 1092–93, quoted in Hunt, “Scientists, Engineers, and Wildman Whitehouse.”
“fallacious”: Quoted in Thomson, The Life of William Thomson, 1:330.
“The further the electricity”: Donard De Cogan, “Dr E.O.W. Whitehouse and the 1858 Trans-Atlantic Cable,” History of Technology 10 (1985): 2.
“Forty-eight words”: Report of the Joint Committee to Inquire into the Construction of Submarine Telegraph Cables (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1861), 237.
“bullied”: Clarke, Voice Across the Sea.
most complex machines: See Mindell, Between Human and Machine, 107ff.
came to understand heat: See Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2010), 22–23.
a bandwidth of 3,000 hertz: Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 26.
between continuous signals: See ibid., 27.
how to send telegraph and telephone signals: It was already “common practice to send telegraph and telephone signals on the same wires,” but Nyquist’s work, by minimizing interference from telegraph signals, led to clearer telephone calls. See John Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1980), 38.
“the world of technical communications”: James L. Massey, “Information Theory: The Copernican System of Communications,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22, no. 12 (1984): 27, cited in Guizzo, “The Essential Message.”
“by the speed of transmission”: Harry Nyquist, “Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed,” Bell System Technical Journal, April 1924, 332. See also Nyquist, “Certain Topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory,” Transactions of the AIEE 47 (April 1928): 617–44.
the tantalizing suggestion: On the relationship between Nyquist’s and Shannon’s work, see William Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 7, no. 2 (1985): 121.
“an important influence”: Robert Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22, no. 6 (May 1984): 123.
“a ball rolling,” etc.: Ralph Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” Bell System Technical Journal 7, no. 3 (July 1928): 536–38.
a 20-letter telegram: Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 25.
“practical engineering value”: Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” 539.
“within the realm”: Ibid., 563.
“very bright in some ways”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“appears to have taken”: Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory, 40.
“It came as a bomb”: Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” 4.
“The fundamental problem”: Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 5.
“selected from a set”: Ibid. Emphasis in original.
diagram: Ibid., 7.
genes as information-bearers: Around the time of the publication of “A Mathematical Theory,” Shannon attempted to estimate the amount of information, in bits, in the human genome. Shannon, untitled document, July 12, 1949, Shannon Papers; see Gleick, The Information, 231.
“what would be the simplest source”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
A fair coin: For simplicity’s sake, this section deals only with discrete symbols, rather than continuous ones.
One bit is the amount of information: We discuss Shannon’s revolutionary response to the problem of noise below. Here we are leaving noise out of consideration; but one should bear in mind that if we were to learn about the result of a coin toss through a noisy channel, we may still get less than one bit of information, even if the coin toss itself were fair.
“a device with two stable positions”: Shannon, “Mathematical Theory,” 6.
diagram: Ibid., 20.
“average surprise”: In other words, if the coin is weighted so that the probability of tails is low, then the larger surprise of seeing tails is balanced against the longer odds of seeing that outcome.
“I don’t regard it”: Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon,” 123.
three basic Morse characters: This slightly simplifies Shannon’s example, which allowed for two kinds of spaces, those following letters and those following words.
“XFOML,” etc.: Shannon, “Mathematical Theory,” 14.
“The particular sequence”: Ibid., 15.
unpublished spoof: Shannon, July 4, 1949, Shannon Papers.
“Now, in English”: Poe, “The Gold-Bug,” 101–2.
switching code alphabets: Examples from David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 749.
“I wrote”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“Roughly, redundancy means”: Ibid. 744.
“MST PPL”: Shannon, “Information Theory,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., reprinted in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 216.
“When we write English”: Shannon, “Mathematical Theory,” 25.
“certain known results”: Ibid. This comment aside, cryptography is not an explicit topic of Shannon’s 1948 paper. But because Shannon observed that his work on cryptography and information theory were mutually influential, we have discussed the overlap between the two fields in this chapter, especially to illustrate the importance to both of the concept of redundancy.
“A S-M-A-L-L”: Gleick, The Information, 230.
Shannon explained: Shannon, “Information Theory,” 216.
like transmitting power: Massey, “Information Theory,” 27.
Kahn illustrates this point: Kahn, The Codebreakers, 747.
a code like this: This example is cited in Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 40.
combining the advantages of codes: In Shannon’s more precise terms, combining “source coding” and “channel coding.”
“Up until that time”: Robert Gallager, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
founded a new field and solved most of its problems: David J. C. MacKay, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14.
information reduces “entropy”: Specifically, in Shannon’s terms, entropy can be thought of as uncertainty, and information can be thought of as the amount of uncertainty that is reduced by an observation, measurement, or description.
“And more importantly”: An early version of the anecdote appears in Myron Tribus and Edward C. McIrving, “Energy and Information,” Scientific American 225 (1971): 179–88.
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard: For a more complete story of Szilard and “Maxwell’s Demon,” see Gleick, The Information, 275–80, and George Johnson, Fire in the Mind (New York: Vintage, 1995), 114–21.
“Organisms organize”: Gleick, The Information, 281.
“The Magna Carta” . . . “Without Claude’s work” . . . “A major contribution” . . . “A universal clue” . . . “I reread it every year” . . . “I know of no greater”: Horgan, “Claude E. Shannon,” 22A; Lewbel, “A Personal Tribute to Claude Shannon”; Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, “Remembering Claude Shannon,” March–August 2001, chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/cached/chapter6/6_19b_surveyresponse.htm; Robert W. Lucky, Silicon Dreams, quoted in Lee Dembart, “Book Review: Putting on Thinking Caps Over Artificial Intelligence,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1989.
“While, of course”: R. J. McEliece, The Theory of Information and Coding: Student Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13.
“Weaver became the expositor”: Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 122.
“Radar won the war”: Quoted in Wolfgang Saxon, “Albert G. Hill, 86, Who Helped Develop Radar In World War II,” New York Times, October 29, 1996.
“press’s new series”: Letter from Louis Ridenour to Warren Weaver, March 21, 1949; letter from Ridenour to Mervin Kelly, April 12, 1949, Institute of Communications Research, Record Series 13/5/1, University of Illinois Archives.
bestselling: Jorge Reina Schement and Brent D. Ruben, Between Communication and Information 4 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993), 53.
“There could very easily”: Letter from Weaver to Ridenour, November 17, 1949, Shannon Papers, quoted in Kline.
“I have read your book”: Adam Sedgwick, “Letter to Charles Darwin,” November 24, 1859.
“seemed initially too simple”: Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
“I have always wanted”: J. L. Doob, “Review of A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Mathematical Review 10 (1949): 133.
“Robert was all for it”: Naresh Jain, “Record of the Celebration of the Life of Joseph Leo Doob,” www.math.uiuc.edu/People/doob_record.html.
“Are there infinitely many”: Lashi Bandara, “Explainer: The Point of Pure Mathematics,” The Conversation, August 1, 2011, theconversation.com/explainer-the-point-of-pure-mathematics-2385.
“must learn the art of numbers”: Uta C. Merzbach and Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 77.
“There is a tale told”: Ibid., 91.
“manifesto for mathematics” . . . “Beauty is the first test”: G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), back matter, 85, 135.
“The discussion is suggestive”: Doob, “Review of A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
“LIVERSIDGE: When The Mathematical Theory”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxvii.
“the occasional liberties taken”: Shannon, “Mathematical Theory,” 50.
“When Shannon’s paper appeared”: Solomon W. Golomb, “Claude Elwood Shannon,” Notices of the AMS 49, no. 1 (2001): 9.
“Distinguished and accomplished as Doob was”: Edward O. Thorp, personal communication, April 8, 2017.
“It turned out that everything he claimed”: Sergio Verdú, “Fireside Chat on the Life of Claude Shannon,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEt9P2kp9BE.
“the American John Von Neumann”: Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 135.
“I had full liberty . . . He would begin the discussion”: Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 67–68.
“From every angle”: Paul Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” in The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (Cambridge, MA: American Mathematical Society, 1994).
“In appearance and behaviour”: Hans Freudenthal, “Norbert Wiener,” in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/mathematics-biographies/norbert-wiener.
“Can you show me where”: Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener.”
Shannon had taken Wiener’s class: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“an idol of mine”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxxii.
“Shannon and I”: Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician, 179.
“Under these circumstances”: Norbert Wiener to Walter Pitts, April 4, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA.
“total irresponsibleness”: Norbert Wiener to Arturo Rosenblueth, April 16, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA.
“lost priority”: Norbert Wiener to Warren McCulloch, April 5, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA.
“One of my competitors”: Norbert Wiener to Arturo Rosenblueth, April 16, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA.
“The Bell people”: Norbert Wiener to Warren McCulloch, May 2, 1927, Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA.
“the entire field”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 11.
“might be comparable”: John Platt, “Books That Make a Year’s Reading and a Lifetime’s Enrichment,” New York Times, February 2, 1964.
“the biggest bite”: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, 484.
“Wiener in a sense”: Thomas Kailath, interviewed by the authors, June 2, 2016.
“in fact, there is no evidence”: Sergio Verdú, interviewed by the authors, September 6, 2015.
“When I talked to Norbert”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“I don’t think Wiener”: Claude Shannon, in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xix
“For most people”: Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 228.
“My mother was eternally grateful”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“students and faculty”: “Who We Are,” Douglass Residential College, Rutgers University, douglass.rutgers.edu/history.
“fortunately had good grades”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by the authors, November 12, 2015.
“the best offer”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by the authors, November 12, 2015.
“he was very quiet”: Ibid.
“not very formal”: Ibid.
“I need my wife”: Quoted in Monique Frize, Peter Frize, and Nadine Faulkner, The Bold and the Brave (Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 2009), 285.
“I think I’m more visual than symbolic”: Shannon, interviewed by Albers, 1990.
“He didn’t know math” . . . “He had a weird insight”: Quoted in Kevin Coughlin, “Claude Shannon: The Genius of the Digital Age,” Star-Ledger (New Jersey), February 28, 2001.
“wouldn’t go out of his way”: Quoted in Eugene Chiu et al., “Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon,” December 2001, web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/Shannon1.pdf.
“some of his early papers”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by the authors, November 12, 2015.
“Great scientific theories”: Francis Bello, “The Information Theory,” Fortune, December 1953, 136–58.
“Much as I wish”: Quoted in Kline, The Cybernetics Moment, 124.
“It may be no exaggeration”: Bello, “The Information Theory,” 136.
“Gaylord native son”: “Gaylord’s Claude Shannon: ‘Einstein of Mathematical Theory,’ ” Gaylord Herald Times, October 11, 2000.
“There were many”: Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 15.
“What kind of man”: Bello, “The Young Scientists,” Fortune, June 1954, 142.
“OMNI: Did you feel”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxviii.
“The expansion of the applications”: L. A. de Rosa, “In Which Fields Do We Graze?,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 1, no. 3 (1955): 2.
“Information theory has,” etc.: Shannon, “The Bandwagon,” 3.
“Claude Shannon was”: Robert G. Gallager, “Claude E. Shannon: A Retrospective on His Life, Work, and Impact,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 47, no. 7 (2001): 2694.
“He got a little irritated”: Quoted in Omar Aftab et al., “Information Theory and the Digital Age,” 10, web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/Shannon2.pdf.
“I didn’t like the term”: Quoted in ibid., 9.
“Dear Dr. Kelly”: Letter from Walter B. Smith to M. J. Kelly, May 4, 1951, National Security Agency, www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/friedmanDocuments/PanelCommitteeandBoardRecords/FOLDER_393/41745239078444.pdf.
“I hope very much”: Letter from Kingman Douglass to J. N. Wenger, May 7, 1951, National Security Agency, www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/friedmanDocuments/PanelCommitteeandBoardRecords/FOLDER_393/41745239078444.pdf.
“One of the first” . . . “message externals”: David A. Hatch and Robert Louis Benson, “The Korean War: The SIGINT Background,” National Security Agency, www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/korean_war/sigint_bg.shtml.
“I spoke to Shannon today”: Handwritten note on top of letter from Kingman Douglass to J. N. Wenger, May 7, 1951, National Security Agency, www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/friedmanDocuments/PanelCommitteeandBoardRecords/FOLDER_393/41745239078444.pdf.
“While there have been”: Letter from Kelly to Smith, National Security Agency, www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/friedmanDocuments/PanelCommitteeandBoardRecords/FOLDER_393/41745139078434.pdf.
“to be plucked” . . . “how to keep”: Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 107, 106.
“the fundamental purpose”: National Security Agency, “NSA Regulation Number 11-3,” January 22, 1953, ia601409.us.archive.org/16/items/41788579082758/41788579082758.pdf.
“Because a considerable portion”: Anne S. Brown, “Historical Study: The National Security Agency Scientific Advisory Board, 1952–1963” (Washington, DC: NSA Historian, Office of Central Reference, 1965), 4.
“Lacking accessible, secure areas”: Ibid.
“Price: And you were on the board”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.”
“Could a machine think?”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe et al., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), 359–60.
“I’m a machine”: Quoted in Horgan, “Claude E. Shannon,” 22B.
“had earned the right”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors, August 7, 2014.
“it seemed lost on Shannon”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 141.
“If you read Science Fiction”: Letter from Shannon to Warren S. McCulloch, August 23, 1949, Warren S. McCulloch Papers, American Philosophical Society, Series I, Shannon correspondence.
“to this day”: Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 61.
“Dear Dr. Shannon” . . . “to complete and verify” . . . “Dear Sir”: Letter from Earle L. Morrow to Shannon, December 26, 1957, Shannon Papers; letter from George C. Paro to Shannon, November 17, 1960, Shannon Papers; letter from Daniel J. Quinlan to Shannon, April 13, 1953, Shannon Papers.
“I think the history of science”: Shannon, “Development of Communication and Computing, and My Hobby,” lecture, Inamori Foundation, Kyoto, Japan, November 1985, www.kyotoprize.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/1kB_lct_EN.pdf.
“with the possible capabilities”: [AU: Please supply reference.]
“I went out and got him” . . . “Giving it to a grown man”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxii.
“We did all this”: Quoted in Timothy Johnson, “Claude Elwood Shannon: Information Theorist,” Shannon Papers.
“Hello”: Bell Labs, “Claude Shannon Demonstrates Machine Learning,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKkXibQXGA.
“I was told that”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors, August 7, 2014.
“Mouse with a Memory”: Time, May 19, 1952, 59.
“It is all too human”: “Presentation of a Maze-Solving Machine,” in Cybernetics: Transactions of the Eighth Conference March 15–16, 1951, ed. Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, and Hans Lukas Teuber (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1952), 179.
“The fascination of watching Shannon’s innocent rat”: “Note by the Editors,” in ibid., xvii.
“a demonstration device”: Letter from Shannon to Irene Angus, August 8, 1952, Shannon Papers, cited in Gertner, The Idea Factory.
“The design of game playing machines”: Shannon, “Game Playing Machines,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 786.
“My fondest dream”: Letter from Shannon to Angus, August 8, 1952, Shannon Papers.
“In the long run”: Brock Brewer, “The Man-Machines May Talk First to Dr. Shannon,” Vogue, April 15, 1963, 139.
“The Man-Machines” . . . “Dr. Claude E. Shannon”: Ibid., 89.
“you have to think of problems”: Ibid.
“First, how can we give computers”: Ibid., 139.
“I believe that today”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977.
“thinking is sort of the last thing”: Shannon, interviewed by Albers, 1990.
“We artificial intelligence people”: Shannon, untitled document, 1984, Shannon Papers.
“an oriental sorcerer”: Quoted in Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (New York: Walker, 2002), 23.
“the Turk—even he”: Silas Weir Mitchell, “The Last of a Veteran Chess Player.” Chess Monthly, 1857.
“who is never to be seen”: Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” in The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 438.
“at least one supervisor”: Horgan, “Claude E. Shannon,” 22A.
“Most of us”: Brockway McMillan, interviewed by the authors, January 4, 2016.
“Botvinnik was worried”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxix.
Another incident: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“There have been few new ideas”: Norman Whaland, “A Computer Chess Tutorial,” Byte, October 1978, 168.
“Although perhaps of no practical importance,” etc.: “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 637–38, 650–54.
“Claude went hog wild”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxxi.
“From a behavioristic point of view”: Shannon, “A Chess-Playing Machine,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 655.
“just foolish logic”: H. J. van den Herik, “An Interview with Claude Shannon (September 25, 1980 in Linz, Austria),” ICCA Journal 12, no. 4 (1989): 225.
“A very small percentage,” etc.: Claude Shannon, “Creative Thinking,” March 20, 1952, in Claude Shannon’s Miscellaneous Writings, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (Murray Hill, NJ: Mathematical Sciences Research Center, AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1993), 528–39.
“There is an active structure”: Quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 146.
“I am having a very enjoyable time”: Quoted in Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 27.
“From the questions”: Letter from Shannon to John Riordan, February 20, 1956, Shannon Papers.
“In case men’s lives”: Shannon, Assorted lecture notes, n.d., Shannon Papers.
“The following analysis”: Shannon, “The Portfolio Problem,” n.d., Shannon Papers.
“It always seemed to me”: Letter from Shannon to H. W. Bode, October 3, 1956, Shannon Papers, quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 146.
“Having spent fifteen years”: Quoted in Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 27.
“Shannon is one of the great people”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors, August 7, 2014.
said to have wondered aloud: Thomas Kailath, interviewed by the authors, June 2, 2016.
“You are going to God’s country”: “Remembering Claude Shannon,” chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/cached/chapter6/6_19b_surveyresponse.htm.
“a three-sided verandah”: National Register of Historic Places application, Edmund Dwight House, Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System, mhc-macris.net/Details.aspx?MhcId=WNT.19.
“Although he continued”: Robert E. Kahn, “A Tribute to Claude E. Shannon,” IEEE Communications Magazine, July 2001, 18.
unicycles, in every permutation: Ronald Graham, interviewed by the authors, August, 23, 2014.
“I’ve always pursued my interests”: Quoted in Horgan, “Claude E. Shannon,” 22A.
“These were things”: Robert Gallager, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“He was really lionized”: Quoted in Chiu et al., “Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon.”
“If I’m going to spend”: Leonard Kleinrock, interviewed by the authors, September 16, 2016.
“I can’t be an advisor”: Quoted in Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 61.
“I was in such awe of him”: Robert Gallager, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“I always felt honored”: Leonard Kleinrock, interviewed by the authors, September 16, 2016.
“I was just so impressed”: Quoted in Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 59.
“His classes were like”: Leonard Kleinrock, interviewed by the authors, September 16, 2016.
“For some problems”: Quoted in ibid., 60.
“He was not the sort of person”: Robert Gallager, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“We all revered Shannon”: Quoted in Guizzo, “The Essential Message,” 59.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you’”: Leonard Kleinrock, interviewed by the authors, September 26, 2016.
“Shannon’s favorite thing to do”: Larry Roberts, interviewed by the authors, September 16, 2016.
“I had what I thought”: Robert Gallager, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“People would go in”: Irwin Jacobs, interviewed by the authors, January 1, 2015.
“He did a lot of work at home” . . . “Did you know”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“golden age of information theory”: Thomas Kailath, interviewed by the authors, June 2, 2016.
“The intellectual content”: Anthony Ephremides, interviewed by the authors, May 31, 2016.
“I believe that scientists”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxiii.
“no mathematician should ever”: Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology, 70.
“I started telling him about it”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors, August 7, 2014.
“For everybody who built”: Robert Gallager, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“I think that this present century”: Quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 317.
“Much of the conversation”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“I had a good opinion”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxvii.
“I run the checkbook”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by Albers, 1990.
“their work in the stock market”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“Nah, the commissions would kill you”: Quoted in Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 208.
“I even did some work”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxiv–xxv.
“used common sense”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“I make my money”: Price, “Claude E. Shannon: An Interview.”
“Inside information”: Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula, 21.
“The secretary warned me,” etc.: Edward O. Thorp, “The Invention of the First Wearable Computer,” Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, October 1998, 4–8.
“The division of labor”: Thorp, personal communication, March 24, 2017.
“Do you mind”: Lewbel, “A Personal Tribute to Claude Shannon.”
“As a physical experiment” . . . “He just showed up”: Arthur Lewbel, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“One nice thing”: Lewbel, “A Personal Tribute to Claude Shannon.”
“The Juggling Club”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“When Galileo wanted”: Ronald Graham, interviewed by the authors, August, 23, 2014.
“it was something”: Gertner, The Idea Factory, 319–20.
“mathematics is often described”: Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham, Magical Mathematics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 137.
“next time you see some jugglers”: Burkard Polster, “The Mathematics of Juggling,” 1, qedcat.com/articles/juggling_survey.pdf.
“He liked peculiar motions”: Arthur Lewbel, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“is complex enough”: Peter J. Beek and Arthur Lewbel, “The Science of Juggling,” Scientific American 273, no. 5 (November 1995): 92.
“‘Do you think juggling’s a mere trick,’” etc.: Shannon, “Scientific Aspects of Juggling,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 850–57.
“In his twenty years’ devotion”: “Enrico Rastelli,” Vanity Fair, February 1932, 49.
“It all started”: Shannon, “Claude Shannon’s No Drop Juggling Diorama,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, 847.
“each side making a catch”: Beek and Lewbel, “The Science of Juggling,” 97.
“The greatest numbers jugglers”: Shannon, “Claude Shannon’s No Drop Juggling Diorama,” 849.
“He was a very modest guy”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by the authors, November 12, 2015.
“I don’t think I was ever motivated”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxiv.
“the calls would come”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“brilliant contributions”: National Medal of Science citation, www.nationalmedals.org/laureates/claude-e-shannon.
“eleven men whose lifelong purpose”: Lyndon Johnson, Remarks Upon Presenting the National Medal of Science Awards for 1966, February 6, 1967.
“I was seven”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“to get something out of Claude”: Letter from Rud: Kompfner to Pierce, June 1, 1977, quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 323.
“An American driving in England”: Shannon, “The Fourth-Dimensional Twist, or a Modest Proposal in Aid of the American Driver in England,” 1978, Shannon Papers.
“he’d get an award”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“I have never seen such stage fright”: Quoted in University of California Television, “Claude Shannon: Father of the Information Age,” 2002, www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Whj_nL-x8.
“He just felt that people”: Quoted in ibid.
“Since our retirement”: Letter from Shannon to Ben [last name unknown], November 15, 1980, Shannon Papers.
“we always thought that information theory”: Thomas Kailath, interviewed by the authors, June 2, 2016.
“he didn’t like to boast”: Arthur Lewbel, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
nominated for the Nobel in physics: Nomination Database, NobelPrize.org, www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=10947.
“You know, there’s no Nobel”: Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 394, n. 327.
“After a quarter of a century”: Kazuo Inamori, “Philosophy,” Inamori Foundation, April 12, 1984, www.inamori-f.or.jp/en/kyoto_prize/.
“The Kyoto prize”: “Kyoto Prize 2015: Inamori Foundation Announces This Year’s Laureates,” June 19, 2015, goo.gl/kYNzdJ.
“two strong women”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“I don’t know how history is taught,” etc.: Shannon, “Development of Communication and Computing, and My Hobby.”
“She is leaving him”: Debra Dean, The Madonnas of Leningrad (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 119.
“Claude was never a person”: Robert Gallager, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“Do you juggle?”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“In 1983, he went to a doctor”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by the authors, November 12, 2015.
“very quiet”: Quoted in “Claude Shannon: Father of the Information Age.”
“They felt like they’d earned” . . . “She was the primary caretaker” . . . “There were days”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“I asked him something”: Robert Fano, interviewed by the authors, October 23, 2015.
“Oddly enough”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by the authors, November 12, 2015.
speed finally approached, but did not break, the Shannon Limit: These were the “turbo codes” discovered by Claude Berrou and colleagues. Codes capable of a similar speed had been discovered by Robert Gallager in 1960, but “the decoding process he proposed was simply too complicated for 1960s-era technology.” See Øyvind Ytrehus, “An Introduction to Turbo Codes and Iterative Decoding,” Telektronikk 98, no. 1 (2002): 65–78; Larry Hardesty, “Explained: Gallager Codes,” MIT News, January 21, 2010, news.mit.edu/2010/gallager-codes-0121.
“The sides of his personality”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“The last time I saw Claude”: Arthur Lewbel, interviewed by the authors, August 8, 2014.
“home was a real refuge” . . . “she was very devoted”: Peggy Shannon, interviewed by the authors, December 9, 2015.
“at noon I’d go over” . . . “He still liked”: Betty Shannon, interviewed by the authors, November 12, 2015.
“The true spirit of delight”: Bertrand Russell, “The Study of Mathematics,” in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: Longman, 1919).
“A uniquely playful” . . . “Shannon radiated”: “Remembering Claude Shannon.”
“the logical and natural development”: Ibid.
“[His] ideas form a beautiful symphony”: Ibid.
“It was like an earthquake”: Anthony Ephremides, interviewed by the authors, May 31, 2016.
“For many scientists”: Michael Urheber. Bava’s Gift: Awakening to the Impossible.
“all the advanced signal processing”: Quoted in “Claude Shannon: Father of the Information Age.”
“In our age”: Quoted in Mark Semenovich Pinsker, “Reflections of Some Shannon Lecturers,” IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, Summer 1998, 22.
“For him, the harder a problem”: George Johnson, “Claude Shannon, Mathematician, Dies at 84,” New York Times, February 27, 2001.
“Courage is one of the things”: Richard Hamming, “You and Your Research,” lecture, Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar, March 7, 1986, www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html.
“When you work with someone like Shannon”: Leonard Kleinrock, interviewed by the authors, September 16, 2016.
“I’ve been more interested”: Shannon, interviewed by John Horgan (unpublished).
“He was not interested”: Henry Pollak, interviewed by the authors, August 7, 2014.
“Shannon’s puzzle-solving”: Robert Gallager, “The Impact of Information Theory on Information Technology,” lecture slides, February 28, 2006.
“Dear Dennis”: Quoted in John Horgan, “Poetic Masterpiece of Claude Shannon, Father of Information Theory, Published for the First Time,” Scientific American, March 28, 2011, blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/poetic-masterpiece-of-claude-shannon-father-of-information-theory-published-for-the-first-time.
“Modern man”: Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1976), 264.