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Claude Shannon's Masters Thesis was on the application of Boolean Algebra to circuits, effectively founding digital circuit design. That should have been enough

Claude Shannon's Masters Thesis was on the application of Boolean Algebra to circuits, effectively founding digital circuit design. That should have been enough for anyone, but not for Shannon. His later work on Information theory has proven important in everything from evolution to quantum mechanics (particularly, relative quantum entropy) and perhaps even to future physics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1fz5NLjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1fz5NLjQs). He also did early work in cryptanalysis, AI (minimax chess algorithm and a learning robotic mouse). His student was Ivan Sutherland. More or less, whether its networking, signal processing, compression, crypto, machine learning, circuit design, basically anything to do with the digital age, you'll find Shannon did important foundational work there.

tnecniv 8y ago
If I recall, Turing actually started to formalize some ideas in information theory, but stopped after meeting Shannon. Shannon showed Turing his information theory work and Turing decided Shannon already solved the question he was interested in.
porpoisely 8y ago
It is a shame shannon doesn't get the recognition he deserves. Computer science has many fathers and as amazing as Turing was, nobody contributed more and nobody has a better claim to call himself the father of computer science than Shannon. Not Turing. Not Church. He outstrips them all but nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  > shannon doesn't get the recognition he deserves > nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him Yeah! Nobody has heard of that guy. His Mathematical Theory of Communication only has 112 thousand (!!!) google scholar citations, apparently the #4 most cited paper of all time in any field (#1–3, 5–9 are biochem/chem papers, and #10 is clinical psych). For comparison, Turing has 5 papers with 10–12k citations each.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    You are nitpicking. Perhaps I should have said academia, but I figured people would get the point. Your comment proves my point. Shannon made greater contribution than Turing. But everyone knows Turing. There are movies made about him. When I said "people", I thought it was obvious I meant the general public.
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      > everyone knows Turing This is nowhere close to true. I am willing to grant you that a random person off the street is more likely to have heard of Turing than Shannon. But much more likely still to have heard of Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or James Watson. Public awareness of scientists drops off very quickly. That’s just the way life works. It’s lucky enough if random people off the street have heard of small countries or political leaders of their own country. Most people don’t remember most of the major genocides of the past few decades. Shannon is without question one of the best known (by the general public) 30 or 50 scientists of the 20th century. It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him. At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea. But not everyone can capture the public imagination the way (say) Einstein did.
      - j1vms 8y ago
        It's probably the case that there are no scientists besides maybe Einstein (E = mc^2) and Newton (apple falling from the tree -> gravity) that the general public would be able to identify by name and refer to one thing that very roughly approximates what they did. Who knows though, given the public's enthusiasm for modern tech and its stars (Jobs, Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc.) maybe one day scientists' work might make a "Casey's Top 40"-like popular countdown if presented the right way! Till then there's always Epic Rap Battles of History, here's Einstein vs. Hawking (120 million views): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k
      - tomhoward 8y ago
        > It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him. > At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea. You've berated the parent for saying - obviously figuratively - "nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him", then conceded that having a STEM degree would make a significant difference to the likelihood of whether someone knows of him. It's a benign thing to trigger such an outburst, especially given there's so little substantive difference between your positions. For what it's worth, I'm a self-taught software developer of 15+ years' experience and I've consumed plenty of material about science and scientific history - but without any academic STEM study. I hadn't heard of him - at least to the extent that I remember. Whereas of course I know plenty about Turing. And for what it's worth I know much more of Turing's life than Hawking's, Goodall's or Watson's. The question of how many non-CS/STEM-qualified people have heard about him is an interesting one to explore, and it can do without the poisonous tone you've introduced.
- Wistar 8y ago
  Just two nights ago, on Amazon Prime streaming, I watched the very good show "BBC Order And Disorder Episode 2 - Information" hosted by the excellent Jim Al-Khalili. He profiles Alan Turing and says that Turing was only half the story and then introduces Claude Shannon—a name with which I was unfamiliar—and Bell Labs. Great stuff.
  - atombender 8y ago
    Great documentary. I can heartily recommend all of Al-Khalili's documentaries: "Atom", "The End of the Universe", "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity" and "Chemistry: A Volatile History" are all excellent. The last two are my favorites; while his documentaries on physics and quantum mechanics are good, they describe scientific phenomena that are pretty difficult to understand, let alone visualize, and it ends up having to be a little over-simplified, or explained with unsatisfying visual analogies. The ones on chemistry and electricity are a lot more (no pun intended) grounded, and include some fun demonstrations.
    - Wistar 8y ago
      Wow, thank you. I will seek out those shows.
      - mooreds 8y ago
        I did some googling and it looks like you can see at least some of this stuff online: http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/chemistry-a-volatile-history http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/chemistry-a-volatile-h...
        Wistar 8y ago
        Thank you. I discovered last night that some of the shows you mention are not on amazon Prime. Only the more astronomical and physics-related ones are (Gravity; Order/Disorder; Everything/Nothing; Beginning/End of the Universe).
      - atombender 8y ago
- zild3d 8y ago
  Shannon came up much more than Turing during undergrad for electrical engineering. Can't learn signal processing, information theory, discrete math, etc without mentioning him. Perhaps he falls in the EE/ECE realm more than CS
- brmgb 8y ago
  Actually, I think Shannon might be more known than Turing. Pretty much anyone doing signal processing, which is part of the standard physics curriculum where I'm from, will be introduced to the Nyquist–Shannon theorem while Church and Turing did fundational work in logic and computability but with far less practical application.
jiggunjer 8y ago
And he was handsome too! Some guys have it all.

tnecniv 8y ago

If I recall, Turing actually started to formalize some ideas in information theory, but stopped after meeting Shannon. Shannon showed Turing his information theory work and Turing decided Shannon already solved the question he was interested in.

porpoisely 8y ago

It is a shame shannon doesn't get the recognition he deserves. Computer science has many fathers and as amazing as Turing was, nobody contributed more and nobody has a better claim to call himself the father of computer science than Shannon. Not Turing. Not Church. He outstrips them all but nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him.

jacobolus 8y ago
> shannon doesn't get the recognition he deserves > nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him Yeah! Nobody has heard of that guy. His Mathematical Theory of Communication only has 112 thousand (!!!) google scholar citations, apparently the #4 most cited paper of all time in any field (#1–3, 5–9 are biochem/chem papers, and #10 is clinical psych). For comparison, Turing has 5 papers with 10–12k citations each.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  You are nitpicking. Perhaps I should have said academia, but I figured people would get the point. Your comment proves my point. Shannon made greater contribution than Turing. But everyone knows Turing. There are movies made about him. When I said "people", I thought it was obvious I meant the general public.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    > everyone knows Turing This is nowhere close to true. I am willing to grant you that a random person off the street is more likely to have heard of Turing than Shannon. But much more likely still to have heard of Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or James Watson. Public awareness of scientists drops off very quickly. That’s just the way life works. It’s lucky enough if random people off the street have heard of small countries or political leaders of their own country. Most people don’t remember most of the major genocides of the past few decades. Shannon is without question one of the best known (by the general public) 30 or 50 scientists of the 20th century. It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him. At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea. But not everyone can capture the public imagination the way (say) Einstein did.
    - j1vms 8y ago
      It's probably the case that there are no scientists besides maybe Einstein (E = mc^2) and Newton (apple falling from the tree -> gravity) that the general public would be able to identify by name and refer to one thing that very roughly approximates what they did. Who knows though, given the public's enthusiasm for modern tech and its stars (Jobs, Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc.) maybe one day scientists' work might make a "Casey's Top 40"-like popular countdown if presented the right way! Till then there's always Epic Rap Battles of History, here's Einstein vs. Hawking (120 million views): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k
    - tomhoward 8y ago
      > It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him. > At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea. You've berated the parent for saying - obviously figuratively - "nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him", then conceded that having a STEM degree would make a significant difference to the likelihood of whether someone knows of him. It's a benign thing to trigger such an outburst, especially given there's so little substantive difference between your positions. For what it's worth, I'm a self-taught software developer of 15+ years' experience and I've consumed plenty of material about science and scientific history - but without any academic STEM study. I hadn't heard of him - at least to the extent that I remember. Whereas of course I know plenty about Turing. And for what it's worth I know much more of Turing's life than Hawking's, Goodall's or Watson's. The question of how many non-CS/STEM-qualified people have heard about him is an interesting one to explore, and it can do without the poisonous tone you've introduced.
Wistar 8y ago
Just two nights ago, on Amazon Prime streaming, I watched the very good show "BBC Order And Disorder Episode 2 - Information" hosted by the excellent Jim Al-Khalili. He profiles Alan Turing and says that Turing was only half the story and then introduces Claude Shannon—a name with which I was unfamiliar—and Bell Labs. Great stuff.
- atombender 8y ago
  Great documentary. I can heartily recommend all of Al-Khalili's documentaries: "Atom", "The End of the Universe", "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity" and "Chemistry: A Volatile History" are all excellent. The last two are my favorites; while his documentaries on physics and quantum mechanics are good, they describe scientific phenomena that are pretty difficult to understand, let alone visualize, and it ends up having to be a little over-simplified, or explained with unsatisfying visual analogies. The ones on chemistry and electricity are a lot more (no pun intended) grounded, and include some fun demonstrations.
  - Wistar 8y ago
    Wow, thank you. I will seek out those shows.
    - mooreds 8y ago
      I did some googling and it looks like you can see at least some of this stuff online: http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/chemistry-a-volatile-history http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/chemistry-a-volatile-h...
      - Wistar 8y ago
        Thank you. I discovered last night that some of the shows you mention are not on amazon Prime. Only the more astronomical and physics-related ones are (Gravity; Order/Disorder; Everything/Nothing; Beginning/End of the Universe).
    - atombender 8y ago
zild3d 8y ago
Shannon came up much more than Turing during undergrad for electrical engineering. Can't learn signal processing, information theory, discrete math, etc without mentioning him. Perhaps he falls in the EE/ECE realm more than CS
brmgb 8y ago
Actually, I think Shannon might be more known than Turing. Pretty much anyone doing signal processing, which is part of the standard physics curriculum where I'm from, will be introduced to the Nyquist–Shannon theorem while Church and Turing did fundational work in logic and computability but with far less practical application.

jiggunjer 8y ago

And he was handsome too! Some guys have it all.