Portal:Electronics/Selected biography/19
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory". He was the first to describe the Boolean gates (electronic circuits) that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and he built the first machine learning device, thus founding the field of artificial intelligence. He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship, thereby establishing the theory behind digital computing and digital circuits. In 1987, Howard Gardner called his thesis "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century", and Herman Goldstine described it as "surely ... one of the most important master's theses ever written ... It helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science." (Full article...)