Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001) was an American mathematician and electrical engineer whose work founded information theory and linked Boolean algebra to switching circuits. At MIT and Bell Labs he worked on relay circuits, cryptography, communication channels, and computing machines. His austere mathematical style made him one of the central architects of the digital age.
This entry joins Claude Shannon's 1938 master's thesis on relay and switching circuits with his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The thesis made a decisive engineering move: it showed that Boolean algebra could describe and simplify relay circuits.
