1) His 1937 Master's Thesis. It's Been Called The "Most Important

There’s a long list of Claude Shannon contributions to technology—
and that’s part of what’s so appealing about him. It would be enough

to write one great paper or build one great machine, but Shannon did
it over and over again. Here’s an abbreviated list of some of his
lasting legacies, things he did or built or worked on that shape our
lives every single day:
1) His 1937 Master’s Thesis. It’s been called the “most important

Master’s Thesis ever written.” Claude Shannon was only 21 when he
wrote it. Basically, it showed how circuits could be used to perform
logic functions, a set of ideas that formed the basis for all digital
computing. Shannon was in a unique place to publish this insight. He
had spent some time working at the phone company, had studied
logic in college, and was trained as both a mathematician and an
engineer.
Now, we live in a world that takes it for granted that all you need to
do enormously complex logical operations are a series of circuits or
switches capable of representing “on” and “off,” or 1 and 0. But until
Shannon made the connection, no one had.
2) His 1948 Information Theory paper. This has been called

“The Magna Carta of the Information Age”—meaning a foundational
document for the age we live in. It took almost 10 years, and in that
time, Shannon discovered that all messages—no matter the sender,
the recipient, the length, the meaning—were all essentially reducible
to the same thing: bits.
Then in the same paper, he showed engineers how they could

compress and encode those bits to transmit information with flawless
accuracy. Someone else once said that Shannon’s work on
information theory was that rare case when someone founds a field
and solves all the major problems in one stroke. His work is the
reason we’re able to write these answers out today, and the 1948
paper is where that started.
3) Early artificial intelligence and machine

learning. Shannon was one of the people involved in the earliest
experiments in artificial intelligence. He built an early illustration of
AI—or at least as close as one could in the 1950s.
It was a robotic mouse named Theseus and it could navigate a maze

and then remember its path through the maze. Shannon believed in
the possibilities of robots and what they could do for our future. In
addition to building robots that could play chess and juggle, he wrote
papers and gave speeches on how all of this would change the world
as we know it.
He predicted (accurately) that computers would be picking our stocks

and beating our chess grandmasters. But he did more than just make
guesses—he built things to show people how it would happen.
4) Cryptography paper. Shannon was a codebreaker during

World War II and also helped to work on encryption for a device that
was used to help FDR and Churchill communicate securely during
the war. He didn’t find much to savor in the day-to-day work of code-
breaking, but he did write a seminal paper in the field of
cryptography, explaining how to construct a theoretically
unbreakable code.
5) Computer chess paper. In 1950, Shannon took his interest in

chess and turned his scientific training to it. It was another case of
him bursting onto the scene and basically asking (and answering)
most of the central questions in a field. In this case, he asked what
computer programmers would need to accomplish to arrive at a
chess-playing machine that could beat humans. Chess programs
today depend on the work he did decades ago.
6) A wearable device for beating roulette. Shannon, along with

Ed Thorp, built what is regarded by some as the world’s first wearable
device. It was a computer used to earn a slight advantage in roulette—
and they actually took it to the casinos in Las Vegas and tried it out! If
you can imagine two MIT professors tossed into the movie Ocean’s 11,
it’s like that. The device worked, but they realized that they were
taking some real risks with the Mob by using it, so they set it to aside.
Those are just a few of the things that this virtually unknown
mathematician and engineer has left all of us. What’s striking isn’t
just what he contributed; it’s that he did so in such an array of fields.
He’s a useful corrective to our era of over-specialization, and a useful
reminder of the power of curiosity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/25/what-were-claude-
shannons-most-important-contributions-to-math-and-
technology/#2ad42a807fd0

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There’s a long list of Claude Shannon contributions to technology—

and that’s part of what’s so appealing about him. It would be enough

1) His 1937 Master’s Thesis. It’s been called the “most important

2) His 1948 Information Theory paper. This has been called

Then in the same paper, he showed engineers how they could

3) Early artificial intelligence and machine

It was a robotic mouse named Theseus and it could navigate a maze

He predicted (accurately) that computers would be picking our stocks

4) Cryptography paper. Shannon was a codebreaker during

5) Computer chess paper. In 1950, Shannon took his interest in

6) A wearable device for beating roulette. Shannon, along with

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