"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is a beautiful read.
You easily find the PDF but once the latex source was available as well - in case you want to reformat for e-book reader: https://web.archive.org/web/20130129025547/http://cm.bell-la...
The reason Claude Shannon is a legend has a lot to do with the fact that his ideas are not just correct and draw from his multidisciplinary knowledge, but also expertly communicated. It is an incredibly readable paper and only absolutely requires a little bit of mathematics when he is describing how to convert a state machine for Morse code to a matrix which would allow someone to calculate how many bits per time unit can actually be transmitted in Morse code -- and this is not absolutely essential, it is calculated in a different way and also it is communicated that you can easily take his word for it that it is whatever numerical value it was. A lot of the arguments about fitting a stream of symbols into an encoding for noisy channels have these lovely diagrams that help to elucidate exactly what he's talking about.
If you want to make that same sort of impact, it is not just important to be a great mind, but to spend a bunch of time practicing how you communicate that information.
Sadly, many extremely smart and profound scientists are quite incapable of (or not interested in) conveying clearly their thoughts to general audiences.
The path integral formalism or the diagrams, albeit being mathematically obscure at first where quite clear from the intuitive viewpoint once he explained them.
The most insidious cause of this is that getting a permanent position in a department still often depends on publishing in the top journals within that department's subject, which means explaining it only to the point that it is coherent to that subject's experts. Any further elucidation is sometimes seen as simplification or over-analysis, and to the detriment of getting an article accepted in subject-leading venues.
Or, to put it another way, putting more bits down the channel than are needed for comprehension by the editor is seen as unnecessary redundancy.
On the other hand, with Information Theory, Shannon was considered to have been ahead by decades.
The closest related work that is considered to come from an independent line of inquiry (taking place in the USSR), but similarly fundamental is Kolmogorov complexity (algorithmic entropy) by Andrey Kolmogorov [1] in 1963.
While Shannon made the huge leap on his own, it should be noted that Harry Nyquist [2] (his colleague at Bell Labs) laid essential foundations through his Nyquist Stability Criterion and studies on bandwidth. This came after harmonic analysis (Fourier transform, etc.) appeared in the 1800s.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Matar%C3%A9
(emphasis in the original)
I find that second sentence humorous every time I read it... I wonder if he had seen the current state of internet discussion if he would have changed "frequently" to "occasionally".
Which is accurate. A lot of Internet communication is a tracker phoning home, TLS handshakes and other communication with content but no "meaning" per se. In Shannon's day, such industrial communications--over telegraph--were common enough to warrant mentioning but not prevalent enough to make up the bulk of human communication traffic.
The bits are the same, the meaning is different.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbo...