- A Mind at Play, a biography of Shannon written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, was published in 2017. 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".
- Father: Claude Elwood Shannon; Mother: Mable Catherine E. Wolf.
- Shannon presented himself as apolitical and an atheist.
- He made contributions to artificial intelligence. His achievements are said to be on par with those of Albert Einstein and Alan Turing in their fields.
- He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
- His mathematical theory of communication laid the foundations for the field of information theory,[9] with his famous paper being called the "Magna Carta of the Information Age" by Scientific American.
- Shannon's childhood hero was Thomas Edison, whom he later learned was a distant cousin. Both Shannon and Edison were descendants of John Ogden (1609-1682), a colonial leader and an ancestor of many distinguished people.
- He was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory".
- The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1972.
- In 1956 Claude Shannon joined the MIT faculty to work in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He continued to serve on the MIT faculty until 1978.
- Shannon is also considered the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O. Thorp. The device was used to improve the odds when playing roulette.
- The Bit Player, a feature film about Shannon directed by Mark Levinson premiered at the World Science Festival in 2019. Drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon in his house in the 1980s, the film was released on Amazon Prime in August 2020.
- On April 30, 2016, Shannon was honored with a Google Doodle to celebrate his life on what would have been his 100th birthday.
- "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. The maze configuration was flexible and it could be modified arbitrarily by rearranging movable partitions.The mouse was designed to search through the corridors until it found the target. Having travelled through the maze, the mouse could then be placed anywhere it had been before, and because of its prior experience it could go directly to the target. 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. Shannon's mouse appears to have been the first artificial learning device of its kind.
- Shannon formulated a version of Kerckhoffs' principle as "The enemy knows the system". In this form it is known as "Shannon's maxim".
- Most of the first 16 years of Shannon's life were spent in Gaylord, where he attended public school, graduating from Gaylord High School in 1932. Shannon showed an inclination towards mechanical and electrical things. His best subjects were science and mathematics. At home, he constructed such devices as models of planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a barbed-wire telegraph system to a friend's house a half-mile away.
- As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship.
- Shannon designed the Minivac 601, a digital computer trainer to teach business people about how computers functioned. It was sold by the Scientific Development Corp starting in 1961.
- There are six statues of Shannon sculpted by Eugene Daub: one at the University of Michigan; one at MIT in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems; one in Gaylord, Michigan; one at the University of California, San Diego; one at Bell Labs; and another at AT&T Shannon Labs. The statue in Gaylord is located in the Claude Shannon Memorial Park. After the breakup of the Bell System, the part of Bell Labs that remained with AT&T Corporation was named Shannon Labs in his honor.
- In 1932, Shannon entered the University of Michigan, where he was introduced to the work of George Boole. He graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees: one in electrical engineering and the other in mathematics.
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