Quote of the Day
In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.
Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.
That paper – “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, became the founding document of the digital age.
The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.
At 21, he wrote the most important master’s thesis of the 20th century.
Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states – open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.
Nobody had ever connected these two things.
His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.
Howard Gardner called it “possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s thesis of the century.”
Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.
At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.
…
Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.
Tech with Mak @techNmak
Posted on X August 20, 2026
And now you know the rest of the story.
Shannon’s work was a significant component of both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering.
What would have happened if George Boole and Claude Shannon could’ve collaborated?
I loved boolean logic when the Navy introduced it to our class. So elegant!
Around 1971-ish, trinary was supposed to be the next big thing out of Japan. I guess it didn’t catch on. Or it got rechristened as fuzzy logic.
Relays are indeed supposed to have exactly two states. They don’t always, though.
Early Dutch computer designers Carel Scholten and Bram Loopstra found this out the hard way, when they designed the ARRA I computer (around 1950) with relay logic. The relays they used had dual coils, and they figured they could use that to implement a two-input logic function using the two coils. The idea makes sense but the reality is that it was horribly unreliable.
In the end, the machine successfully executed a demo program (a random number generator) for its official start-of-service — and never afterwards did anything useful.
It was replaced by a tube logic machine with an entirely different architecture, named ARRA II to make it seem like an upgrade rather than a “scrap everything and start over” new design. That one worked well, and it got several famous computer scientists started on their careers. E.W. Dijkstra was one, Gerrit Blaauw was another (later, he was one of the architects of the IBM 360).
Scholten wrote a neat paper about their experience, in Dutch, entitled “Designing computers, back then”. I translated it a while ago, it has some pretty comical bits in it.
pkoning@804:
Well, that’s interesting. Thank you for that. Is the translated book available?
Yah, “supposed to” and “do” ain’t always the same thning.
Even binary solid state gates would (rarely) get stuck in one logic state; one of the guys wrote a little routine to hammer the hell out of the gate and sometimes it would get unstuck. Your tax dollars supporting nothing but the latest in military troubleshooting…
“…successfully executed a demo program … and never afterwards did anything useful”. A government program?
Huh, editing timed out.
To clarify: hammered digitally, not with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer which was hanging nearby in case we had to scuttle the ship.
So, “binary” is actually a Real Thing.
Gosh, who would have guessed.