Bits & Bytes

Basic To The Basics

It’s been but half a century since the father of the Information Age, Claude Shannon, published the now industry-revered A Mathematical Theory of Communication dissertation. That’s the name of the declassified version published publicly by the then mid-30s mathematician in 1949. The previously classified version, however, was a war-effort published by the prestigious Bell Labs named “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography." Many of the core principles that were published in the popular theory of communication stemmed from the secretive theory of cryptography. In fact, Shannon famously said the following regarding the intrinsic & overlapping properties of information communication theory & cryptography:

They were so close together you couldn’t separate them.

While the majority of this article will focus on what came after his “Mathematical Theory of Communication” thesis, in order to understand a certain standard, it’s imperative we go a decade back in Shannon’s career — to when he was a 28-year old graduate student at MIT. Pursuing a masters in electrical engineering, Shannon found himself working on a room-scale differential analyzer (early version of a computer); his main task was designing new electrical circuits for this computer. However, at this point in time, circuit building was still a relatively futuristic phenomenon — the very best scientists & engineers building circuits considered it an “art” due to the manual brute force try-&-fail approach primarily used.