Also known as: Claude Shannon, Shannon

Claude Shannon (1916–2001) was an American mathematician and engineer who founded information theory, defining how much information a noisy channel can carry.¹

Shannon founded information theory, defining the maximum error-free data rate of a noisy channel.

Life and work

His 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” introduced channel capacity, entropy, and the limits that bound any communication system — including the role of SNR.¹

Contribution

Shannon’s capacity theorem sets the ultimate target that forward error correction strives toward, and his work with Nyquist’s underlies the sampling theorem.

Legacy

Information theory governs the design of every modern digital radio.

Sources

1. Claude Shannon — Wikipedia, for biography and his founding of information theory. ↩ ↩²

See also

• Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem
• Harry Nyquist
• Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
• Forward error correction (FEC)

Learn it step by step

• Sample rate, bandwidth & Nyquist