Bio of Claude Shannon

Reading about some of Shannon's work inspired me, and saw it applied in the enterprise in novel and AI related ways.  Interesting too, this says the book is about the process of genius,  not just being a genius.   Like that idea, we can at least strive to copy process.  See at the tag 'Claude Shannon' below, I have often written about his work.

Mathematizing the World   By Lav R.Vashney

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2017, 384 pp.

Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play (2017)

The American engineering theorist Claude Shannon has largely been written out of popular history, despite developing the mathematical foundations of communication, data compression, digital computers, cryptography, circuit complexity, and networking, as well as laying the foundations for human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence—the defining technologies of the information age.

In A Mind at Play, biographers Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman aim to bring Shannon to popular prominence through an engaging tome with 32 snappy chapters divided into three parts over 286 main pages. The story is presented chronologically, from Shannon’s childhood days to his battle with Alzheimer’s disease at the end, but this history is really just backdrop for painting a cognitive portrait of the man—the psychology and mental processes that shaped Shannon’s life and career. The book explores his external environment and his curiosity-driven motivations from numerous angles, but especially focuses on explaining his thought processes, his way of “doing the cognitive thing.” In this sense, the book can be read as a popular contribution to the cognitive history project of Reviel Netz, a historian of ancient Greek mathematics.

The authors note that “we expect our greatest minds to bear the greatest scars; we prefer our geniuses tortured … [Shannon] was, at once, abnormally brilliant and normally human.” Focusing the book on the details of Shannon’s playful thinking provides a skillful escape from this “tortured genius” cliché prevalent in similar biographies. Let me add that previous biographical treatments of Shannon—as embedded in larger historical narratives such as The Information by James Gleick, The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner, and The Cybernetics Moment by Ronald Kline (which are all excellent)—focus on Shannon’s technical results rather than the process by which he obtained them.  ... "