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Comment by ElFitz | Hacker News Reader

Claude Shannon is an incredible beast of a mind.

A few years back I was wondering about how different methods of communicating information (eg dna, the human ear, speech, radio,…) could be compared.

At the same time, nautilus published an article on him, by pure coincidence. And I somehow landed on it, by accident.

It was truly mind blowing. These questions and their answers had been thoroughly, systematically, explored, described, and laid bare.

After years of scorning mathematics, it gave me a renewed interest for them, just so I could get a better understanding.

The applications are just so vast.

And yet, depressingly enough, it is often difficult to share this enthusiasm with most.

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He maybe has the best masters thesis of all time. I truly believe he’s the best engineer of all time, and, even if you dispute that, he’s on the Mount Rushmore.

Turing was allegedly working on his version of information theory or at least the early stages of it, but he met Shannon at Bell Labs and thought he already solved it satisfactorily, and moved on to a new topic.

Shannon’s original paper on Information Theory is also incredibly readable and doesn’t require much background.

If you've not read it, I think you'd enjoy The Information by James Gleick [0] - lots of it touches on these points, and Shannon obviously figures heavily. It's one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information%3A_A_History%2...

Thanks for the cool recommendation! It looks like James Gleick has written a couple of other interesting books, namely:

"Chaos: Making a New Science"

and

"Time Travel"

p.s. you've inspired me to start keeping track of interesting HN search filters, for example- book recommendations.

https://github.com/sleaze/hn-search-filters

I know I've forgotten some interesting ones, hence this effort to organize.

From a newbie on the subject, I really enjoyed Chaos. It’s prompted a further book-buying and research spree :) Pairs well with The Information, I think.

Thanks! Btw, really like your profile. I've started linking and snapshotting the good ones @ https://github.com/sleaze/hn-search-filters, so many good nuggets of wisdom amongst a great deal of noise.

If you find it creepy or don't like it please let me know and I'll purge completely from the repository history.

+1 for The Information - a great book.

Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, Genius is also excellent. And Chaos and Time Travel: A History, although the latter looks at the subject from literary and philosophical perspectives as well as science.

Pair with Darwin Among the Machines and Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson.

Can you provide a link to the article?

I read his biography and would recommend --https://a.co/d/84aw1nl

Sure! Sorry I forgot. Can't edit anymore.

https://nautil.us/how-information-got-re_invented-236738/

I strongly feel we are missing a layer, a bridge between academic and applied, I know that it happens, more of it would be good, once I go digging in the archives of science I become very aware of how much we lose or are unable to act on.

Completely random thought. Maybe some day a mind like Shanon’s will become obsessed with AI and finally create AGI

They may need a billion dollar computer to play with :)

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