A Mathematical Theory of Communication

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an influential 1948 article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon. The article was one of the founding works of the field of information theory. Shannon expanded the ideas of this article in a 1963 book with Warren Weaver titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication (ISBN 0-25-272548-4).

Shannon's diagram of a general communication system.

Shannon's article laid out the basic elements of communication:

An information source which produces a message
A transmitter which operates on the message to create a signal which can be sent through a channel
A channel, which is the medium over which the signal, carrying the information that composes the message, is sent
A receiver, which transforms the signal back into the message intended for delivery
A destination, which can be a person or a machine, for whom or which the message is intended

It also developed the concepts of information entropy and redundancy, and introduced the term bit as a unit of information.