Today, Google Doodle is going to honor Claude Shannon, the one who is known as ‘father of information theory’. It would have been his 100th birthday today. Shannon was born on this day in 1916. He was an American mathematician having distinction in electrical engineer and cryptography, the art of writing and solving codes.
An occasion becomes a milestone in his life when Shannon’s landmark paper was published in 1948, by that piece of work he was widely recognized for having founded the information theory, along with that he is equally famous for founding the digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937. During that period of time, he was 21 years old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursuing his master’s degree at quite a young age. For national defense during World War II, Shannon also contributed a lot to the field of cryptanalysis including his basic work on code-breaking for secure telecommunication purposes.
According to Google Doodle blog, for fun he tinkered with electronic switches and one of his inventions was an electromechanic mouse that he called Theseus–having the ability to teach itself to navigate a maze. In his words, “If you’re thinking, “wait, that sounds a lot like artificial intelligence,” you’re right.
The blog also explains that he regularly brushed shoulders with Einstein and Alan Turing. His work in electronic communications and signal processing–the stuff that earned him the name “the father of information theory” which led him to bring extraordinary changes in the storage and transmission of data.
The Google Doodle paid homage to his reputation of being a world-class prankster and a juggler, juggling the numbers 0 and 1. Shannon would never be forgotten for his remarkable achievements as a great academician.