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Comment by Cybiote | Hacker News Reader

Claude Shannon's Masters Thesis was on the application of Boolean Algebra to circuits, effectively founding digital circuit design. That should have been enough for anyone, but not for Shannon. His later work on Information theory has proven important in everything from evolution to quantum mechanics (particularly, relative quantum entropy) and perhaps even to future physics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1fz5NLjQs).

He also did early work in cryptanalysis, AI (minimax chess algorithm and a learning robotic mouse). His student was Ivan Sutherland. More or less, whether its networking, signal processing, compression, crypto, machine learning, circuit design, basically anything to do with the digital age, you'll find Shannon did important foundational work there.

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If I recall, Turing actually started to formalize some ideas in information theory, but stopped after meeting Shannon. Shannon showed Turing his information theory work and Turing decided Shannon already solved the question he was interested in.

It is a shame shannon doesn't get the recognition he deserves. Computer science has many fathers and as amazing as Turing was, nobody contributed more and nobody has a better claim to call himself the father of computer science than Shannon. Not Turing. Not Church. He outstrips them all but nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him.

Just two nights ago, on Amazon Prime streaming, I watched the very good show "BBC Order And Disorder Episode 2 - Information" hosted by the excellent Jim Al-Khalili. He profiles Alan Turing and says that Turing was only half the story and then introduces Claude Shannon—a name with which I was unfamiliar—and Bell Labs. Great stuff.

Great documentary. I can heartily recommend all of Al-Khalili's documentaries: "Atom", "The End of the Universe", "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity" and "Chemistry: A Volatile History" are all excellent. The last two are my favorites; while his documentaries on physics and quantum mechanics are good, they describe scientific phenomena that are pretty difficult to understand, let alone visualize, and it ends up having to be a little over-simplified, or explained with unsatisfying visual analogies. The ones on chemistry and electricity are a lot more (no pun intended) grounded, and include some fun demonstrations.

Wow, thank you. I will seek out those shows.

I did some googling and it looks like you can see at least some of this stuff online: http://www.documentarytube.com/videos/chemistry-a-volatile-h...

Thank you. I discovered last night that some of the shows you mention are not on amazon Prime. Only the more astronomical and physics-related ones are (Gravity; Order/Disorder; Everything/Nothing; Beginning/End of the Universe).

Email me if you can't find them. I should be able to dig up a source.

Thank you. I found them all on YouTube.

Shannon came up much more than Turing during undergrad for electrical engineering. Can't learn signal processing, information theory, discrete math, etc without mentioning him. Perhaps he falls in the EE/ECE realm more than CS

Actually, I think Shannon might be more known than Turing.

Pretty much anyone doing signal processing, which is part of the standard physics curriculum where I'm from, will be introduced to the Nyquist–Shannon theorem while Church and Turing did fundational work in logic and computability but with far less practical application.

And he was handsome too! Some guys have it all.

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