Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)
juggle.org
juggle.org
He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.
I particularly liked the idea that he is one of the most important figures in science/tech/maths that most people have not heard of.
I'm nearly always met with "Who..??"
> In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’”
So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an article about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory:
> “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications."
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-w...
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-...
Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger contrast.
As an example, my grandparents would often think I was my father when I would visit them. If I tried to get them to talk to me, as me, expect confusion and nothing to make sense. Let them just talk, though, and what they were saying would make sense. Especially once I realized they were largely taking up a context I just wasn't in.
I didn't know what to do so I just played along with it. We spent the next hour having the most in depth and amazing conversation about the history of hist Baseball experiences from his youth. He remembered nearly everything from that period of his life and we discussed it in exceptional detail.
I walked away both elated that we could have that moment and incredibly sad that most victims of this disease seem entirely trapped within it. They're still in there. They're still that same person.
Her illness progressed very quickly in the sense that it only took her about a year for her to regress into an infant mentally. She spent about 10 - 13 years in bed screaming like a child.
My point being that dementia can progress quickly, but you can still live with it for a long time (if you are unlucky enough). We, as in her family, spent years hoping she would die, while she spent years suffering.
I remember when my mom got it, I did a bunch of research and figured out that she probably only had about 3 more years of okayish memory and a decent quality of life, and then maybe 5 more years after that until death. That stuff depends on age and gender, and my mom was young so I think those numbers are even shorter for someone who is old and male like Shannon. There is of course plenty of variability and some people live decades with it.
So yeah, doesn't sound like "very quick" progression. But if your baseline is a healthy adult aging normally, it would still seem very quick compared to that, I guess.
[0] https://www.healthline.com/health/alzheimers/life-expectancy
I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.
AMA.
[] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.
I've gone on to do a PhD in Physics and write lots of popular science for some big YouTube channels (SciShow, Veritasium) and among some of the more long term influences on my career I definitely count your talk as one of them!
Keep it up!
PS: I see from the data you've put on the site formerly (and to be honest, still) known as Twitter that I pass reasonably close to you sporadically and irregularly, but every month or so on average. If you'd like to meet for coffee[0] and cake at some point, my contact details are in my profile.
It's not too late to edit it, so here is the comment as intended:
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I have an Erdös number of 2[+] via a paper, co-authored with Ron Graham, on the topic of the maths of juggling.
AMA.
[+] I also have an Erdös number of the second type of 3, but that doesn't involve Ron Graham or juggling.
That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself.
- Turing never won the Turing Award.
- Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award.
- Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her.
Walter Payton Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999.
Taylor Swift Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them.
Stuart Parkin Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data
The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.
And the paper Shannon wrote (pdf): https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/r...
( maybe following in the footsteps of James Clerk Maxwell https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell like other Shannon ideas )
It's a fasincating topic that had far more complexity than I initially expected.
AMA
Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer.
It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles.
At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1.
If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice the points of B. In such a system, the sky is the limit for the number of points.
EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
A quick googling gives estimates of ~117B humans have ever been born.
So if you were the cleverest person on the planet, ever, you'd have 1-in-117B intelligence?
Also, I'm wondering whether a difference of 1 IQ point is even noticeable, and if not, what's the smallest noticeable increment or faction of a unit.
It would be handy to have standardized test answers from every human ever, but sadly most are dead as you point out.
IQ is standardised so that population scores on a standard test have a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. It's possible to obtain this with as fewer than 100 people, distributed as:
* One "genius" who scores 200
* One "dumbass" who scores 0
* 87 "everyman" who score 100.
The mean here is clearly 100, and the variance is sqrt(20000/89) = 14.99.
Of course this is very contrived and doesn't look much like a Bell curve in the first place. But with say a million people it wouldn't take much to come up with a more realistic looking example.
Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's not that consistent. Some brains just work better for their size.