Claude Shannon
Shannon didn’t invent the computer — he proved electricity could think.
Information
A physical quantity, once someone thought to measure it.
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Hamming code
Richard Hamming got tired of his weekend calculations being thrown out over an error the machine could detect but not fix, so in 1950 he built a code that could do both.
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.
Quantum teleportation
Quantum teleportation moves the description of a quantum state between two locations using entanglement and an ordinary message, not matter or energy, and it cannot go faster than light because that ordinary message still has to arrive.
Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts
Thomas Young worked out that Egyptian cartouches spelled foreign kings' names phonetically; Jean-François Champollion needed one more comparison, in September 1822, to see that the same was true of native Egyptian rulers all along.