ABSTRACT
Claude Elwood Shannon (see Figure 11.1) was born on April 30, 1916, in Gaylord, Michigan, where he stayed and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936. He left to do his graduate work at MIT. His supervisor, Vannevar Bush, had Shannon take care of a computing device called the Differential Analyzer, which was a concoction of rods and gears that needed manual alignment before a problem could be “input” to the machine. These problems involved finding numerical solutions to ordinary differential equations. It was Shannon’s experience with this machine that got him thinking along the lines of replacing the unwieldy mechanical device with electrical circuits. Then he realized that Boolean algebra was similar to the electrical circuit, and from this derived the notion of circuit design according to Boolean algebra to analyze, test, and optimize relay switching circuits. These ideas were expounded in his master’s thesis entitled, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, for which he earned his master’s degree in 1937. His Ph.D., on population genetics, was
Figure 11.1: Claude Shannon.
