[5][6][7] At the University of Michigan, Shannon dual degreed, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in both electrical engineering and mathematics in 1936.

A 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in electrical engineering, his thesis concerned switching circuit theory, demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship,[8] thereby establishing the theory behind digital computing and digital circuits.

"[17] Shannon's theory is widely used and has been fundamental to the success of many scientific endeavors, such as the invention of the compact disc, the development of the Internet, feasibility of mobile phones, the understanding of black holes, and more, and is at the intersection of numerous important fields.

[23][7] Shannon made numerous contributions to the field of artificial intelligence,[2] writing papers on programming a computer for chess, which have been immensely influential.

[39] Shannon's idea were more abstract and relied on mathematics, thereby breaking new ground with his work, with his approach dominating modern-day electrical engineering.

Shannon's work became the foundation of digital circuit design, as it became widely known in the electrical engineering community during and after World War II.

"[41] One of the reviewers of his work commented that "To the best of my knowledge, this is the first application of the methods of symbolic logic to so practical an engineering problem.

[35] Vannevar Bush had suggested that Shannon should work on his dissertation at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in order to develop a mathematical formulation for Mendelian genetics.

In Princeton, Shannon had the opportunity to discuss his ideas with influential scientists and mathematicians such as Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann, and he also had occasional encounters with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel.

[53] In 1945, as the war was coming to an end, the NDRC was issuing a summary of technical reports as a last step prior to its eventual closing down.

Inside the volume on fire control, a special essay titled Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems, coauthored by Shannon, Ralph Beebe Blackman, and Hendrik Wade Bode, formally treated the problem of smoothing the data in fire-control by analogy with "the problem of separating a signal from interfering noise in communications systems.

[55] At the close of the war, he prepared a classified memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography", dated September 1945.

[56] In a footnote near the beginning of the classified report, Shannon announced his intention to "develop these results … in a forthcoming memorandum on the transmission of information.

The same article also proved that any unbreakable system must have essentially the same characteristics as the one-time pad: the key must be truly random, as large as the plaintext, never reused in whole or part, and kept secret.

[58] In 1948, the promised memorandum appeared as "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", an article in two parts in the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal.

The book The Mathematical Theory of Communication[59] reprints Shannon's 1948 article and Warren Weaver's popularization of it, which is accessible to the non-specialist.

Information theory's fundamental contribution to natural language processing and computational linguistics was further established in 1951, in his article "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", showing upper and lower bounds of entropy on the statistics of English – giving a statistical foundation to language analysis.

In addition, he proved that treating space as the 27th letter of the alphabet actually lowers uncertainty in written language, providing a clear quantifiable link between cultural practice and probabilistic cognition.

[61] Shannon co-organized and participated in the Dartmouth workshop of 1956, alongside John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester, and which is considered the founding event of the field of artificial intelligence.

Shannon developed Alzheimer's disease and spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home; he died in 2001, survived by his wife, a son and daughter, and two granddaughters.

[87] They described Shannon as "the most important genius you’ve never heard of, a man whose intellect was on par with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton".

[88] Consultant and writer Tom Rutledge, writing for Boston Review, stated that "Of the computer pioneers who drove the mid-20th-century information technology revolution—an elite men’s club of scholar-engineers who also helped crack Nazi codes and pinpoint missile trajectories—Shannon may have been the most brilliant of them all.

"[18] In an obituary by Neil Sloane and Robert Calderbank, they stated that "Shannon must rank near the top of the list of major figures of twentieth century science".

[92][93][94][95] The Bit Player, a feature film about Shannon directed by Mark Levinson premiered at the World Science Festival in 2019.

The coupling of their unique communicational abilities and ideas generated the Shannon-Weaver model, although the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings emanate entirely from Shannon's work after Weaver's introduction.

"Theseus", created in 1950, was a mechanical mouse controlled by an electromechanical relay circuit that enabled it to move around a labyrinth of 25 squares.

If placed in unfamiliar territory, it was programmed to search until it reached a known location and then it would proceed to the target, adding the new knowledge to its memory and learning new behavior.

[24][25] His process for having the computer decide on which move to make was a minimax procedure, based on an evaluation function of a given chess position.

A report from Barron's on August 11, 1986, detailed the recent performance of 1,026 mutual funds, and Shannon achieved a higher return than 1,025 of them.

An ad hoc committee of the IEEE Information Theory Society including Christina Fragouli, Rüdiger Urbanke, Michelle Effros, Lav Varshney and Sergio Verdú,[106] coordinated worldwide events.