Pointless trivia entry, really.
Anyway, that's the source of my name if you didn't know… Making it somewhat ironic that I ended up as a telecommunications specialist! Dunno what I'm talking about? Here's an excerpt:
In 1948, Claude Shannon, then a young engineer working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., published a landmark paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication."In that paper, Shannon defined what the once fuzzy concept of "information" meant for communications engineers and proposed a precise way to quantify it: in his theory, the fundamental unit of information is the bit.
Shannon showed that every communications channel has a maximum rate for reliable data transmission, which he called the channel capacity, measured in bits per second. He demonstrated that by using certain coding schemes, you could transmit data up to the channel's full capacity, virtually free of errorsan astonishing result that surprised engineers at the time.
From space probes to cellphones and CD players, Shannon's ideas are invisibly embedded in the digital technologies that make our lives more interesting and comfortable. A tinkerer, juggling enthusiast, and exceptional chess player, Shannon was also famous for riding the halls of Bell Labs on a unicycle. He died on 24 February 2001, at age 84, after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.
Anyway, I know I've mentioned him here before, but he's an interesting character. Along those lines, seven years before I was born my father wrote a book called Temporal Sampling of Signals with Band-Limited Spectrum based in part on Shannon's work on communication in the presence of noise…
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