Join The Claude Shannon Fan Club

Do you know Claude Shannon? He conceived a little thing called the "bit" (which is also called a "shannon," in his honor) - yeah, that kind of bit. One expert, when pressed to describe his influence on the information age, said, “It’s like saying how much influence the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature." I've been blown away to discover how far ahead of his time he was, and just how unique not only his contributions, but also his methods, were. At just twenty-two years old, he wrote a twenty-five page paper that "would ultimately become known as the most influential master's thesis in history."

Jon Gertner contrasts the nature of his groundbreaking insight with the other fantastic breakthrough of the era, the solid-state semiconductor transistor, in "The Idea Factory," "There was little doubt, even by the transistor's inventors, that if Shockley's team at Bell Labs had not gotten to the transistor first, someone else in the United States or in Europe would have soon after. A couple of years, at most. (By contrast) with Shannon's startling ideas on information, it was one of the rare moments in history, an academic would later point out, 'where somebody founded a field, stated all the major results, and proved most of them all pretty much at once.' Eventually, mathematicians would debate not whether Shannon was ahead of his contemporaries. They would debate whether he was twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ahead."

If the 400-page biography, "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age" is a bit too much to bite off in your spare time, this classic 1992 profile, "Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory," republished on the centennial of his birth, is well-worth a read. It describes many aspects of what I've come to appreciate about him: his eccentricity, his playfulness, and his willingness to pursue his curiosities, even when they seemed irrelevant (they often weren't, despite even his own ignorance of that fact at the outset). It shouldn't be surprising that such an individual would be capable of breakthrough thinking; what's surprising is, that we naturally assume otherwise!

After describing a room full of his various international accolades, the article describes a room full of playful inventions: "This roomful of gadgets reveals the other Shannon, the one who rode through the halls of Bell Laboratories on a unicycle while simultaneously juggling four balls (talk about a divergent diversion!), invented a rocket-powered Frisbee, and designed a 'mind-reading' machine.

This room typifies the Shannon who—seeking insights that could lead to a chess-playing machine—began playing so much chess at work that 'at least one supervisor became somewhat worried,' according to a former colleague.

Shannon makes no apologies. 'I’ve always pursued my interests without much regard for final value or value to the world,” he said cheerfully. 'I’ve spent lots of time on totally useless things.'"

I wonder whether there's space for such folks in our organizations today? Do we cultivate quirks or squash them? Do we kindle curiosities, or quench them? Do we give the impression, however subtle, that there’s a certain particularly valued fit-style? We could be driving out genius!

"Shannon’s life exposes the fiction that, in the creation of knowledge, theory must always precede practice and that engineers with “dirty hands” can never spawn the rich ideas that scientists later spend generations extending, revising, and deepening. While Shannon deserves acclaim for launching the digital revolution, his centennial is equally an occasion to celebrate all those persistent practitioners—those use-inspired problem solvers—who endure the condescension of gazers at stars and navels.

To those who insist that practice can never give birth to new pathways of inquiry and paradigms of knowledge, Shannon provides the definitive negative confirmation."

(From this nice article, which also helped me track down photo credit for the image I found on google!)

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