The Mathematical Theory of Communication

One shouldn’t necessarily think of information in terms of meaning. Rather, one might think of it in terms of its ability to resolve uncertainty. Information provided a recipient with something that was not previously known, was not predictable, was not redundant. “We take the essence of information as the irreducible, fundamental underlying uncert

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication”—“the magna carta of the information age,” as Scientific American later called it—wasn’t about one particular thing, but rather about general rules and unifying ideas. “He was always searching for deep and fundamental relations,” Shannon’s colleague Brock McMillan explains. And here he had found them. One of

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” established a framework called information theory that fixed the flaws of earlier attempts to study this topic formally and provided the tools that ended up making the modern digital communication revolution possible. Underlying this framework is a simple but profound idea: by adding complexity to the rules

His calculations showed that the information content of a message could not exceed the capacity of the channel through which you were sending it. Much in the same way a pipe could only carry so many gallons of water per second and no more, a transmission channel could only carry so many bits of information at a certain rate and no more. Anything be

In the history of information theory, and science in general, one of the most influential research papers of the twentieth century is Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”