Talk:Claude Shannon

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[edit] Shannon's theorem vs. the Shannon-Hartley law

As far as I know, these two are different things. The latter is only for a fixed-bandwidth channel with a continuous input and output alphabets, while the former is more general (for example, it includes discrete-alphabet channels, where the notion of bandwidth itself is meaningless). If there are no objections, I will add a Shannon's theorem page and fix the inconsistencies on this page. Julius.kusuma 17:24, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] The relationship between Shannon's proof of the isomorphism between Boolean algebra and relay circuits, and the early electronic computers

Regarding the NPOV link which I inserted in the main article:

Some silly idiot reverted my edits in which I made clear that Shannon was working independently of the early electronic computer pioneers. That is, they grasped the idea that relay circuits could be used to solve mathematical problems, but put them together in a rather ad hoc fashion, while Shannon went at in the opposite direction---he grasped that Boolean algebra could be used to simplify relay circuits, and then (in the same paper) reached the idea that relay circuits could be used to solve Boolean algebra problems, but never got around to actually exploring the idea in hardware. I researched and wrote an eleven-page paper on Shannon's 1938 paper for an undergraduate history class, so I actually know what I am talking about.

There were three major pioneers: Atanasoff, Zuse, and Stibitz; while Aiken is disputed because his contemporaneous machines were electromechanical (a halfway step from Bush's differential analyzer), not fully electronic. Atanasoff and Zuse are on the record as explicitly admitting that they did not know of Shannon's work at the time they built their machines. See John V. Atanasoff, “Advent of Electronic Digital Computing,” Annals of the History of Computing 6, no. 3 (July 1984): 241, and Konrad Zuse, ”The Outline of a Computer Development from Mechanics to Electronics,” in The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, 3rd edition, ed. Brian Randell (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982), 178.

Although I couldn't get primary sources for Stibitz (he was on the East Coast and I'm on the West Coast), there are two secondary sources that state that Stibitz did not know of Shannon's work when he was putting together his first machine. They are: James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 406, and G. Harry Stine, The Untold Story of the Computer Revolution: Bits, Bytes, Bauds, and Brains (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 93.

If that idiot (who was too cowardly to login or to create an account) doesn't respond within a few days with cites to refute my cites, I'm going to put my edits back in!

--Coolcaesar 10:58, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for going to the effort of posting the sources. One thing, though; I'd encourage you to avoid making personal attacks ("Silly idiot", "cowardly", and so forth); see Wikipedia:No personal attacks and Wikipedia:Civility. — Matt Crypto 11:45, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)


Of course they (Zuse, Aiken, etc.) are "on the record" as claiming they didn't know about Shannon's work, which was widely known and published in the Transactions [of the] American Institute of Electrical Engineers of 1938. It's lucky for the others that Shannon was such a nice (and brilliant) guy that he was generous with his ideas and didn't battle for credits.
Isn't Zuse an interesting guy: one of his patents was TWICE rejected by the German government, both before and after World War II. He alleged that Z1 and Z2 were destroyed during an Allied bombing run, so history has no physical trace of them. He would later claim to have invented the Plaenkalkul, the "first" computer language, during WWII -- when in fact, it was never published until the 1970's and never actually implemented in his lifetime!
You cite, as evidence, published literature by Atanasoff (about Atanasoff), and literature by Zuse (about Zuse). Your history professor should have warned you (bold emphasis mine):
"...all fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction." -- Shirley Abbott
"Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying." -- Humphrey Carpenter
"All autobiography is self-indulgent." -- Daphne Du Maurier
"An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." -- George Orwell (a man too "cowardly", in your eyes, to publish under his own name of Eric Blair)
"We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess." -- Mark Twain (a man too "cowardly", in your eyes, to publish under his own name of Samuel Clemens)
"My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. " -- Indira Gandhi (whose surname has an interesting history as well, evidence of cowardism in your eye?)
If your history professor failed to critique you about the pitfalls of relying on autobiographies, demand a refund and transfer out of that college!

--

Well, I already graduated from that college with a bachelor's degree in history, and that college happens to be the most prestigious public university in the United States.

Also, you conflate my dislike of anonymity with a dislike of pseudonyms. How childish. I have nothing against pseudonyms. As you should know, some of the greatest documents in history, like the Federalist Papers, were published under pseudonyms. Also, the convoluted history of the Gandhi family is more about political opportunism, which again is distinguishable.

The point is, I respect those who choose to adopt new names by choice, or through marriage, for either political or personal reasons, but I have a strong dislike of persons who are so cowardly as to not even dignify their writing with an identifier.

Now, turning to the heart of the issue, as a casual student of philosophy, I am painfully aware of the epistemological risks that arise from relying on any source, especially one where the author was probably aware that he was writing for an audience of historians, and thus there is the risk that his writing was self-serving.

However, you fail to answer the obvious question: motive. Why would Zuse or Atanasoff (or even Stibitz) do such a thing? Certainly, you are correct that Zuse has some credibility problems, although his work after the war does establish him to be a computer scientist of decent ability.

Still, Atanasoff was well-known during his lifetime for being ferociously litigious about who should be credited as the inventor of the electronic computer, yet in that 1984 paper, he conceded his weakness in Boolean algebra: "I did not recognize its application to my undertaking, and I obtained my result by trial, at first, and then by a kind of cognition." If he was as self-serving as you seem to believe, then why would he admit his ignorance of Shannon's work when he could so easily have claimed to have reached the same result on his own?

The other problem I have with your approach to knowledge is that you seem to infer that just because Shannon's paper was published in the Transactions of the AIEE, it instantly became well-known to the entire electrical engineering community. Apparently you've never worked in electrical engineering, or computer science, or any other technical field; there are literally hundreds of new articles published every month, and it is impossible for every scientist and engineer to stay informed about all of them.

If you read Vannevar Bush's essay, "As We May Think," or H.G. Wells' book, "World Brain," you will immediately realize how daunting the task seemed to the intellectuals of the 1930s, long before computerized article databases became available. Both the memex and the World Brain were proposed solutions to the problem of information overload (although the phrase itself would not be coined until 1970, by Alvin Toffler). And before you point out that "As You May Think" was published in 1945, keep in mind that the problem was so evident by the early 1930s that Vannevar Bush was already fantasizing about a proto-memex at the time. See Bush, Vannevar, “The Inscrutable ‘Thirties,” Technology Review 35, no. 4 (January 1933): 123-148.

I will concede that one can safely infer that most of the electrical engineering community probably was aware of Shannon's paper by 1940, the year he won the Alfred Noble Prize, but the year that counts is 1938, the year the paper was published and the same year that Stibitz and Atanasoff had already begun building their first devices. Prior to 1940, Shannon was not yet an intellectual celebrity, and it is unreasonable to draw the inference that other intellectuals were desperate to immediately read, absorb, and marvel at anything with his name on it.

Also, in your biased attempt to write a Whiggish hagiography of Shannon (and if you don't understand why "Whiggish" is pejorative, then you are way out of your depth when it comes to history), you fail to realize that Shannon was not the first to come up with the isomorphism between relay circuits and Boolean algebra. As Alice Mary Hilton puts it: "The analogy between switching circuits and the propositional calculus occurred to scientists in all parts of the world. It was suggested by P. Erénfést in his review of Couturat’s Algébra in Logiki in 1910. The Russian physicist V. I. Sestakov worked out details in 1934-1935, but did not publish them until 1941. Independently, the same views were published by Akira Nakasima and Masao Hanzawa in a Japanese journal, in 1936." See Alice Mary Hilton, Logic, Computing Machines, and Automation (Washington, DC: Spartan Books, 1963), 230. Shannon was not the first to publish; he was only the first to get discovered.

Finally, here's one last quote, to back up my basic point: "Boolean algebra was something less than a major influence in the invention and design of early electronic computers...the 1950s were well under way before the algebra was used at all at some of the major pioneering electronic computer organizations." R. K. Richards, Digital Design (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971), 1.

I hate to engage in ad hominem arguments, but since you started it, I'm not afraid to fire back. I'm beginning to think the reason you don't want to identify yourself is that you don't want anything traceable to you, so people who know you can never find out you're an immature troll. You're too embarrassed to admit that unlike me, you have not spent hours in one of the largest libraries in the world, plowing through every issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and selected issues from about a dozen other journals (including Transactions of the AIEE), and over a hundred different books, to winnow out the complicated truth about Shannon's contributions. Professional historians of science and technology (and their devoted students) know that the true story of innovation is never a simple straight line. Finally, if you don't know what STS, SSK, or SCOT stand for, then you have a lot of reading to do.

--Coolcaesar 07:53, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Please all see or remember Wikipedia:No personal attacks:
  • "Comment on content, not on the contributor. Discuss the facts and how to express them, not the attributes of the other party. Never suggest a view is invalid simply because of who its proponent is."
Thanks. Hyacinth 03:25, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Title

Why was this renamed from Claude Shannon? -MagnaMopus 17:43, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Legacy and Tributes

In my view, remarks such as the 'greatest scientist of the 20th century' detract from the quality of this article. The tributes section needs to be edited. Cryptonaut 04:51, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article title

Is there some reason why this article is currently titled "Claude Elwood Shannon" instead of "Claude Shannon"? Wikipedia title guidelines for people use the most commonly known name that doesn't require disambiguation, preferring (for Western-style names) only "Givenname Surname" without a compelling reasons otherwise. From my comp-sci and engineering studies, I seem to recall "Claude Shannon" as being the usual form, and there are no other Claude Shannons currently in Wikipedia, let alone one with such global prominence. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:32, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Oops, I missed MagnaMopus's same, unanswered question above. If no one responds shortly, I will assume there is no good reason for this, and will ask the sysops to move this article (as Claude Shannon has a non-trivial edit history already). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:34, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I concur. (I came to here to make the very comments made above.)  --LambiamTalk 05:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Sounds good to me. Dicklyon 05:25, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I've put in a move request.[1]  --LambiamTalk 05:29, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
So did I. But I put it in the wrong section, so I reverted it. Thanks. Dicklyon 05:32, 16 April 2007 (UTC)