This book is magical. Whenever I felt like the authors were going on about something uninteresting, the chapter would end. Jimmy and Rob have meticulously fused the life of Shannon, including the humdrum aspects, with a lucid and entertaining description of his contributions. It is garnished with numerous quotations at the beginnings of the chapter. Go ahead and read about, to quote the book, “a thinker who devoted his life to the study of communication” while being “so uncommunicative”.

Language: Enjoyable.

Impression (long): The book told me a lot about Shannon, obviously, but alongside it helped me see broader events that were going on in the world through his eyes. One of the first amazing things Shannon did was combining Boolean logic, which was taught to him as a part of his philosophy class, with the design of circuits. Yes, today it is the other way, we learn about boolean logic because of its role in circuits but they were two completely different worlds. The circuits at that time were simpler. Initially, they were just a combination of switches which had to be combined to follow a certain statement. This could be something like, (if A is on and B is on) or (if A is off and B is off) then output on else output off. This with three letters can already lead to massive number of switches. The circuit designers at that point had a knack for reducing the number of switches involved in solving such propositional problems. Shannon realised that the structure that underlies is exactly the same as that of Boole’s work (and incidently I had recently read about Boole himself in the book “Men of mathematics”) on the law of thoughts. When assigned a circuit designing task, Shannon would start with a pen and paper, scribble things and then use three (for example) switches to implement a circuit that others would, after much tinkering and time, construct with some twelve switches.

The book talks about his time during the war. Among the many things he did one of them involved working out how to send signals across the Atlantic from the US to the other allied partners. They tried putting a cable under the ocean, a mammoth task, with a ship almost manually. They did eventually succeed but they couldn’t get it to be reliable. Increasing the signal to suppress the noise, without understanding too much about how things are working, led to the frying of the cable. This as you can imagine was an expensive affair and not just in terms of money — lives were at stake. Shannon’s work eventually showed that it is not what you say in noise it is how you say it. His theory of information proved what was essentially believed to be impossible: noise can not be completely removed. Shannon proved just this that indeed noise can be completely removed (for all practical purposes). In fact he even calculated the limit to which one could send this, until him, mysterious notion of information and it was later in his life found that people have been getting ever close to his limit but nobody has violated it. The book does a wonderful job at explaining what information means. While I work in quantum information itself I also found some of their examples rather striking and illuminating. The process of arriving at the right definition was an astounding journey to witness. One of the methods used by Shannon to demonstrate his notion of information was based on flipping and randomly opening pages of books, followed by selection of letters. His method was instead put in use to essentially automatically generate propaganda against capitalism.

Shannon worked at this magical place called Bell labs which was responsible for things spanning radars, lasers, transistors and information theory. It was said that people were either paid for they had already done, that was Shannon, or for what they will do. The place allowed its researchers almost complete freedom to do what they liked. In fact, even after Shannon accepted a chair at MIT, Bell labs continued to pay him. Shannon’s strategy for solving hard problems has been beautifully described in the book. It is described in chapter 25 and it is worth reading for any serious researcher of I suppose any field but for physics and mathematics with certainty. In addition to having talent and training he says a third quality of a real innovator was related to “motivation” “a desire to find out the answer, the desire to find out what makes things tick”. “Constructive dissatisfaction” or “a slight irritation when things don’t quite look right” he elaborates. He ends with stressing the importance of a feeling like “I get a big bang out of proving a theorem. If I’ve been trying to prove a mathematical theorem for a week or so and I finally get the solution, I get a big bang out of it.”

His technique was to first simplify — get rid of all the extraneous information; easier said than done. Two, encircle your problem with existing answers to similar questions and then deduce what is it that the answers have in common. Three, if the first two don’t work, change the viewpoints, try to observe the mental blocks for viewing the problem a certain way. Fourth, perform a structural analysis: break the problem into smaller parts and analyse separately. Fifth, invert the premise and conclusion. If you succeed proving the inverse see what holds on the largest level and what fails.

He did many insane things. He tried building robotic mice that could navigate through mazes and learn, he had scared his parents by threatening to run away to the circus, he continued to juggle, he would ride(?) unicycles while juggling, he had constructed a machine along with a student of his for exploiting the roulette wheel at a casino, he had invested in many stocks (including those of Qualcomm and a company that would later be acquired by HP; says something about MIT), he once gave a lecture about investing and mathematics, he was quite comfortable with the idea of machines replacing humans, he gave a world chess champion a hard time once. There are many interesting aspects about his life such as what his influence was to the people at MIT, what kind of a supervisor he was, the unconventionality of his house with a dedicated lab, his indifference to money, his seriousness about the art of juggling and the mathematics thereof, his fear of speaking in public for having run out of ideas to contribute.

A quick anecdote. After he had become globally renowned a person was delivering a lecture when the back door opens and Shannon walks in. He sits at the back, whispers a little something to the person next to him. He quietly slips out. Afterwards this lecturer finds Shannon was only inquiring about the restroom.

His first love was due to an overlap of interest in music. That did not last as much. The second was with another mathematician. She actually supported her parents from her grant money and did so all her life to an extend. Interestingly she wrote many of the articles Shannon apparently just spoke out which confused some historians. She loved him dearly until his death due to a mental illness.

Let me end with this encouraging note.

Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn’t know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, “What would the average random code do?” He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think. We don’t usually associate the fields of mathematics or engineering with the ancient virtue of courage. But Shannon’s wasn’t the usual contribution to those fields, either, and though he surely would have been the last to admit this, it took a great deal of daring to think as Shannon thought and to live as Shannon lived. All of this also had an effect on those around him, including his students. “When you work with someone like Shannon, you expand your horizons, you try to reach far,” remarked Len Kleinrock.