I am a mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor. My research turned switching circuits into logic and communication into a mathematical science of information.
I applied my mathematics to investing. Shannon's demon holds equal parts cash and a stock and rebalances regularly to profit from random price jitter. A 1986 Barron's report found my return beat 1,025 of 1,026 mutual funds.
I designed the Minivac 601, a digital computer trainer that taught business people how computers work. The Scientific Development Corp sold it from 1961, bringing computer technology education beyond engineers.
In 1956, as information theory spread fast, I wrote the one-page editorial "The Bandwagon" for the IRE Transactions on Information Theory, urging researchers to keep a scientific attitude.
With John McCarthy I co-edited Automata Studies, published in 1956. Its categories followed the subject headings of my 1953 paper "Computers and Automata", framing early research on the science of intelligent machines.
In 1950 I designed and built Theseus, a learning machine: a mechanical mouse moving through a maze, tracked by an electromechanical relay circuit beneath the surface. It was one of the first experiments in artificial intelligence research.
In 1949 I presented "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", one of the first articles on computer chess. I described position scoring and move selection, laying foundations for future chess programs and AI research.
In a paper completed in 1949 and published in March 1950, I estimated the game-tree complexity of chess at roughly 10^120. The figure, now the Shannon number, is still regarded as accurate in computer science research.
In 1948 I published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell System Technical Journal. I defined information entropy as the uncertainty a message removes, turning communication engineering into a science.
In classified Bell Labs research, published in 1949, I proved the one-time pad unbreakable and showed every unbreakable cipher must share its properties. It put cryptography on a mathematical, scientific footing.
At Bell Labs in World War II I worked on fire-control systems. I invented signal-flow graphs in 1942 and co-authored a 1945 essay treating data smoothing as separating signal from noise — engineering that heralded the Information Age.
In my 1937 MIT master's thesis I designed switching circuits from George Boole's algebra, replacing ad hoc relay design with rigorous engineering. It became the foundation of digital circuit design and computer technology.
