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“Probably no
single work in this century has more profoundly altered man's
understanding of communication than C E Shannon's article, ‘A
mathematical theory of communication.’” The
founding document of information theory and |
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“In 1948, Dr. Shannon published his masterpiece, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication,’ giving birth to the science called information theory. The motivation again was practical: how to transmit messages while keeping them from becoming garbled by noise. To analyze this problem properly, he realized, he had to come up with a precise definition of information, a dauntingly slippery concept. The information content of a message, he proposed, has nothing to do with its content but simply with the number of 1's and 0's that it takes to transmit it. This was a jarring notion to a generation of engineers who were accustomed to thinking of communication in terms of sending electromagnetic waveforms down a wire. ‘Nobody had come close to this idea before,’ Dr. Gallager said. ‘This was not something somebody else would have done for a very long time. The overarching lesson was that the nature of the message did not matter — it could be numbers, words, music, video. Ultimately it was all just 1's and 0's.’ Today, when gigabytes of movie trailers, Napster files and e-mail messages course through the same wires as telephone calls, the idea seems almost elemental. But it has its roots in Dr. Shannon's paper, which may contain the first published occurrence of the word "'bit'." (New York Times, obit. 27 Feb, 2001). |
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SHANNON, C. E. “A
Mathematical Theory of Communication,” In The Bell System Technical
Journal, Volume XXVII, No. 3 & 4, p.379-423 & p.623-656. N.Y.,
1948. The whole volume offered. Octavo, contemporary green library
cloth. "American mathematician Claude Shannon developed information theory by 1948. He reduced the notion of information to a series of yes/no choices, which could be presented by a binary code. Each choice, or piece of information, he called a 'bit.' In this way, complex information could be organized according to strict mathematical principles. His methods, although devised in the context of engineering and technology, were soon seen to have applications not only to computer design but to virtually every subject in which language was important, such as linguistics, psychology, cryptography, and phonetics; further applications were possible in any area where the transmission of information in any form was important" (Mount and List, Milestones, 65; Dictionary of Scientists, 436). Catalogue number in bottom margin of title page, otherwise fine condition. |