One of the great unsung heroes of 20th century science is Claude Shannon, an engineer at the famous Bell Laboratories during its hey day in the mid 20th century. Shannon’s most enduring contribution to science is information theory: the idea that underpins all digital communication.
In a famous paper dating from the late 1940s, Shannon set out the fundamental problem of communication: to reproduce at one point in space, a message that has been created at another. The message is first encoded in some way, transmitted and then decoded.
Shannon’s showed that a message can always be reproduced at another point in space with arbitrary precision provided noise is below some threshold level. He went on to work out how much information could be sent in this way, a property known as the capacity of this information channel.
via technology review
