7 ms·

Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)

179 points by xiande04 2y ago

overu589 2y ago
It’s funny seeing Shannon as an old man. Yeah, sure, it was a long time ago and everyone gets old. For some reason, in my mind’s eye he is immortalized as the ~35yr old of his prime.
pcl 2y ago
Wayback cache url: http://web.archive.org/web/20241108095721/https://www.juggle.org/claude-shannon-mathematician-engineer-genius-juggler/ http://web.archive.org/web/20241108095721/https://www.juggle... And the paper Shannon wrote (pdf): https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/refs/Claude%20Shannon%20-%20Scientific%20Aspects%20of%20Juggling.pdf https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/r...
soufron 2y ago
[flagged]
- red_trumpet 2y ago
  Care to explain that? Apparently, Shannon worked against the Nazis, being contracted by the National Defense Research Committee[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Wartime_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Wartime_researc...
jjcc 2y ago
One of the photo shows his highly concentration. I have a hypothesis that many world class masters have talent to get into "Flow State". Juggling is one of the activity that associate with the state. Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer. It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
- machiaweliczny 2y ago
  I’ve watched vide with guy that supposedly has 200IQ and in his view IQ is ability to focus on small on small set of things but many high IQ ppl can’t „refocus” it easily and aren’t doing well in life.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels. It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles. At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1. If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice the points of B. In such a system, the sky is the limit for the number of points. EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
    - naveen99 2y ago
      It’s close though. Iq sd is 15. 200 is about 6.7 sd above mean. Odds of being 6.5 standard deviations away is 1 in 12 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
      - FredPret 2y ago
        Sure, but we can’t say someone has a 1-in-12B intelligence when we only have 8B (or whatever) people. We can only go as high as 1-in-<current_pop>
        willvarfar 2y ago
        we can compare their intelligence to those who have previously lived? A quick googling gives estimates of ~117B humans have ever been born. So if you were the cleverest person on the planet, ever, you'd have 1-in-117B intelligence?
lqet 2y ago
Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue: > In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’” So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an article about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory: > “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications." [0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-with-his-Alzheimers-disease https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-w... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-and-father-of-information-theory https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-...
- diggan 2y ago
  Brief moments of clarity is pretty common in people with Alzheimer's. Having worked with elder care, there were lots of moments where people who usually didn't speak at all and were mostly confused, suddenly started having conversations and seeming to understand where they were, and then some hours later, being back in the state of utter confusion. Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger contrast.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s could be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent? Like maybe Alzheimer’s would sort of… drop him into conversations without context, but then he’d work out the context and try to give advice anyway?
prophesi 2y ago
Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life. [0] https://thebitplayer.com/ https://thebitplayer.com/
- graemep 2y ago
  Loved that film. I particularly liked the idea that he is one of the most important figures in science/tech/maths that most people have not heard of.
  - maroonblazer 2y ago
    Yeah, along with John von Neumann. I frequently mention those two whenever the icebreaker question "What persons, living or dead, would you most like to have a meal with?" I'm nearly always met with "Who..??"
- dmd 2y ago
  My wife worked a bunch on this film, and it's absolutely great. (Among other things, she handles IP requests for the MIT Museum, where much of Shannon's stuff is kept.)
- wellthisisgreat 2y ago
  Their?
  - prophesi 2y ago
    Huh?
nemesis17 2y ago
Our 3.5 friend was named after him.
- brap 2y ago
  I honestly thought this was a new Claude model before clicking the link.
docdeek 2y ago
> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler... I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.
- ColinWright 2y ago
  I have an Erdös number of 2[] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling. AMA. [] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.
  - thicknavyrain 2y ago
    Just want to say, I recognised your name immediately when I saw it. Saw a talk you gave at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury back in 2010 when I was a teenager and it is still, to this day, one of the best popular mathematics talks I've ever witnessed (obviously helped by the immense juggling talent). I've gone on to do a PhD in Physics and write lots of popular science for some big YouTube channels (SciShow, Veritasium) and among some of the more long term influences on my career I definitely count your talk as one of them!
    - ColinWright 2y ago
      That's very kind ... thank you ... and excellent that you are carrying on the task of making science accessible. Keep it up! PS: I see from the data you've put on the site formerly (and to be honest, still) known as Twitter that I pass reasonably close to you sporadically and irregularly, but every month or so on average. If you'd like to meet for coffee[0] and cake at some point, my contact details are in my profile.
  - ColinWright 2y ago
    I was tired last night ... it has been a long week, so I forgot that the single asterisk is used for italics ... hence the screwed up formatting. It's not too late to edit it, so here is the comment as intended: ======== I have an Erdös number of 2[+] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling. AMA. [+] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.
jasonhong 2y ago
Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-shannon-the-father-of-the-information-age-turns-1100100 https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s...): He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.
- warner25 2y ago
  My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics (1940) -- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 -- https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 -- Bear in mind, this was a Mendelian analysis almost 20 years before they worked out that DNA was a sequence of nucleotides.
  - jeifneioka 2y ago
    Sometimes I can't help but feel like the past had more low hanging fruit for making big discoveries. Not that anything in genetics was particularly low hanging, but discoveries in that field were perhaps more accessible to somebody who had "only" studied it for a few years. Modern breakthroughs nowadays are more likely to require huge teams of people working for a decade or more and needing funding to match.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Ah yes, the "Useless Machine". Fun little thing to build... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
alberto_ol 2y ago
previous submission 7 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15168016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15168016
kaycebasques 2y ago
From what I read in The Dream Machine, Shannon sounded like a super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922
- jll29 2y ago
  I'm still reading it, but apparently he stopped talking to his own mother forever after she refused to give him a cookie intended for guests.
  - sourcepluck 2y ago
    Finally, a human being brave enough to take cookies as seriously as they deserve.
- awanderingmind 2y ago
  That was an interesting (and short!) read. Most of what he wrote is applicable to ML/AI today. A direct link to the pdf for those too lazy to click twice: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774
jtimdwyer 2y ago
In my experience many mathematicians enjoy things like juggling, change ringing etc. make of it what you will I guess.
jll29 2y ago
Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973." That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself. - Turing never won the Turing Award. - Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award. - Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
- madcaptenor 2y ago
  I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were: Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her. Walter Payton Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999. Taylor Swift Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them. Stuart Parkin Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.
  - a_dabbler 2y ago
    I think the Taylor Swift example is more awkward - to have an award named after you and then given to you and never given to anyone else!
BenoitEssiambre 2y ago
Also Poet: https://cmrr-star.ucsd.edu/static/shannonsite/pdfs/poster.pdf https://cmrr-star.ucsd.edu/static/shannonsite/pdfs/poster.pd... ( maybe following in the footsteps of James Clerk Maxwell https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell like other Shannon ideas )
fitsumbelay 2y ago
Feynman as well
CSMastermind 2y ago
For anyone interested in the math of juggling here's a Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmCXbh-zw61C7jR2YofYxCxAanVrSEmOm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmCXbh-zw61C7jR2YofYx... It's a fasincating topic that had far more complexity than I initially expected.
- ColinWright 2y ago
  I'm featured on that list multiple times. AMA

179 points by xiande04 2y ago

It’s funny seeing Shannon as an old man. Yeah, sure, it was a long time ago and everyone gets old. For some reason, in my mind’s eye he is immortalized as the ~35yr old of his prime.

pcl 2y ago

Wayback cache url: http://web.archive.org/web/20241108095721/https://www.juggle.org/claude-shannon-mathematician-engineer-genius-juggler/ http://web.archive.org/web/20241108095721/https://www.juggle... And the paper Shannon wrote (pdf): https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/refs/Claude%20Shannon%20-%20Scientific%20Aspects%20of%20Juggling.pdf https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/r...

soufron 2y ago

[flagged]

red_trumpet 2y ago
Care to explain that? Apparently, Shannon worked against the Nazis, being contracted by the National Defense Research Committee[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Wartime_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Wartime_researc...

jjcc 2y ago

One of the photo shows his highly concentration. I have a hypothesis that many world class masters have talent to get into "Flow State". Juggling is one of the activity that associate with the state. Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer. It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".

machiaweliczny 2y ago
I’ve watched vide with guy that supposedly has 200IQ and in his view IQ is ability to focus on small on small set of things but many high IQ ppl can’t „refocus” it easily and aren’t doing well in life.
- FredPret 2y ago
  A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels. It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles. At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1. If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice the points of B. In such a system, the sky is the limit for the number of points. EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
  - naveen99 2y ago
    It’s close though. Iq sd is 15. 200 is about 6.7 sd above mean. Odds of being 6.5 standard deviations away is 1 in 12 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
    - FredPret 2y ago
      Sure, but we can’t say someone has a 1-in-12B intelligence when we only have 8B (or whatever) people. We can only go as high as 1-in-<current_pop>
      - willvarfar 2y ago
        we can compare their intelligence to those who have previously lived? A quick googling gives estimates of ~117B humans have ever been born. So if you were the cleverest person on the planet, ever, you'd have 1-in-117B intelligence?

lqet 2y ago

Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue: > In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’” So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an article about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory: > “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications." [0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-with-his-Alzheimers-disease https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-w... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-and-father-of-information-theory https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-...

diggan 2y ago
Brief moments of clarity is pretty common in people with Alzheimer's. Having worked with elder care, there were lots of moments where people who usually didn't speak at all and were mostly confused, suddenly started having conversations and seeming to understand where they were, and then some hours later, being back in the state of utter confusion. Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger contrast.
bee_rider 2y ago
I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s could be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent? Like maybe Alzheimer’s would sort of… drop him into conversations without context, but then he’d work out the context and try to give advice anyway?

prophesi 2y ago

Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life. [0] https://thebitplayer.com/ https://thebitplayer.com/

graemep 2y ago
Loved that film. I particularly liked the idea that he is one of the most important figures in science/tech/maths that most people have not heard of.
- maroonblazer 2y ago
  Yeah, along with John von Neumann. I frequently mention those two whenever the icebreaker question "What persons, living or dead, would you most like to have a meal with?" I'm nearly always met with "Who..??"
dmd 2y ago
My wife worked a bunch on this film, and it's absolutely great. (Among other things, she handles IP requests for the MIT Museum, where much of Shannon's stuff is kept.)
wellthisisgreat 2y ago
Their?
- prophesi 2y ago
  Huh?

nemesis17 2y ago

Our 3.5 friend was named after him.

brap 2y ago
I honestly thought this was a new Claude model before clicking the link.

docdeek 2y ago

> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler... I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.

ColinWright 2y ago
I have an Erdös number of 2[] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling. AMA. [] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.
- thicknavyrain 2y ago
  Just want to say, I recognised your name immediately when I saw it. Saw a talk you gave at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury back in 2010 when I was a teenager and it is still, to this day, one of the best popular mathematics talks I've ever witnessed (obviously helped by the immense juggling talent). I've gone on to do a PhD in Physics and write lots of popular science for some big YouTube channels (SciShow, Veritasium) and among some of the more long term influences on my career I definitely count your talk as one of them!
  - ColinWright 2y ago
    That's very kind ... thank you ... and excellent that you are carrying on the task of making science accessible. Keep it up! PS: I see from the data you've put on the site formerly (and to be honest, still) known as Twitter that I pass reasonably close to you sporadically and irregularly, but every month or so on average. If you'd like to meet for coffee[0] and cake at some point, my contact details are in my profile.
- ColinWright 2y ago
  I was tired last night ... it has been a long week, so I forgot that the single asterisk is used for italics ... hence the screwed up formatting. It's not too late to edit it, so here is the comment as intended: ======== I have an Erdös number of 2[+] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling. AMA. [+] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.

jasonhong 2y ago

Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-shannon-the-father-of-the-information-age-turns-1100100 https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s...): He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.

warner25 2y ago
My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics (1940) -- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 -- https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 -- Bear in mind, this was a Mendelian analysis almost 20 years before they worked out that DNA was a sequence of nucleotides.
- jeifneioka 2y ago
  Sometimes I can't help but feel like the past had more low hanging fruit for making big discoveries. Not that anything in genetics was particularly low hanging, but discoveries in that field were perhaps more accessible to somebody who had "only" studied it for a few years. Modern breakthroughs nowadays are more likely to require huge teams of people working for a decade or more and needing funding to match.
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
Ah yes, the "Useless Machine". Fun little thing to build... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine

alberto_ol 2y ago

previous submission 7 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15168016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15168016

kaycebasques 2y ago

From what I read in The Dream Machine, Shannon sounded like a super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922

jll29 2y ago
I'm still reading it, but apparently he stopped talking to his own mother forever after she refused to give him a cookie intended for guests.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  Finally, a human being brave enough to take cookies as seriously as they deserve.
awanderingmind 2y ago
That was an interesting (and short!) read. Most of what he wrote is applicable to ML/AI today. A direct link to the pdf for those too lazy to click twice: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774

jtimdwyer 2y ago

In my experience many mathematicians enjoy things like juggling, change ringing etc. make of it what you will I guess.

jll29 2y ago

Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973." That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself. - Turing never won the Turing Award. - Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award. - Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).

madcaptenor 2y ago
I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were: Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her. Walter Payton Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999. Taylor Swift Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them. Stuart Parkin Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.
- a_dabbler 2y ago
  I think the Taylor Swift example is more awkward - to have an award named after you and then given to you and never given to anyone else!

BenoitEssiambre 2y ago

Also Poet: https://cmrr-star.ucsd.edu/static/shannonsite/pdfs/poster.pdf https://cmrr-star.ucsd.edu/static/shannonsite/pdfs/poster.pd... ( maybe following in the footsteps of James Clerk Maxwell https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell like other Shannon ideas )

fitsumbelay 2y ago

Feynman as well

CSMastermind 2y ago

For anyone interested in the math of juggling here's a Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmCXbh-zw61C7jR2YofYxCxAanVrSEmOm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmCXbh-zw61C7jR2YofYx... It's a fasincating topic that had far more complexity than I initially expected.

ColinWright 2y ago
I'm featured on that list multiple times. AMA