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Researcher · 1916–2001

Claude Shannon

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9:03

Claude Shannon

Shannon didn’t invent the computer — he proved electricity could think.
11:29

Entropy (information theory)

Claude Shannon

Shannon’s 1948 theory redefined communication as a mathematical problem of uncertainty reduction. He proved entropy is the irreducible cost of lossless encoding — not a metaphor, not a heuristic, but a bound. It applies only where messages are statistically structured, and only to syntactic information — never semantics. Its power lies in its narrowness.