The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Man Who Turned Paper into Pixels: How Mathematician and Black Jack Wizard Claude Shannon Ignited the Information Age

The so-called Information Age we live in, like all major leaps in human achievement, isn’t a self-contained bubble that coalesced out of nothingness in a flash of genius but the cumulative product of incremental innovation stretching back centuries. It builds upon the work of multiple inventors, scientists, and thinkers, including Lady Ada Lovelace, celebrated as the world’s first computer programmer, Alan Turing, considered the godfather of modern computing, Paul Otlet, who built a proto-internet in the early twentieth century, and Vannevar Bush, who envisioned the web in 1945.

Among them was the American mathematician, engineer, and cryptographer Claude Shannon (April 30, 1916–February 24, 2001), who laid the foundation for the Information Age. According to British filmmaker Adam Westbrook — who gave us those fantastic video essays on the long game of creativity — Shannon is “the most important man you’ve probably never heard of” and his work impacted the modern world as profoundly as Einstein’s did. In this short film inspired by James Gleick’s remarkable The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (public library) — one of the very best, most illuminating and stimulating books I’ve ever read — Westbrook traces Shannon’s story and his enduring legacy, which permeates our everyday lives more powerfully than we dare imagine.

A Renoir and a receipt — they’re completely different… You couldn’t possibly think of them in the same way — or could you?

For a deeper dive, do treat yourself to Gleick’s The Information, then complement with the story of The Antikythera Mechanism, the world’s first analog computer circa 150 B.C., and The Mundaneum, an analog version of the world wide web from the early twentieth century.


Published July 8, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/08/the-man-who-turned-paper-to-pixel-claude-shannon/

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