Thursday Oct 10, 2019

Have you met Shannon? Conversation with Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman about one of the greatest minds in history (Ep. 81)

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In this episode I have an amazing conversation with Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, authors of “A mind at play”, a book entirely dedicated to the life and achievements of Claude Shannon. Claude Shannon does not need any introduction. But for those who need a refresh, Shannon is the inventor of the information age.

Have you heard of binary code, entropy in information theory, data compression theory (the stuff behind mp3, mpg, zip, etc.), error correcting codes (the stuff that makes your RAM work well), n-grams, block ciphers, the beta distribution, the uncertainty coefficient?

All that stuff has been invented by Claude Shannon :)

Articles:

https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f

https://medium.com/the-mission/on-claude-shannons-103rd-birthday-here-are-103-memorable-claude-shannon-quotes-maxims-and-843de4c716cf?source=your_stories_page---------------------------

http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/how-information-got-re_invented

http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-vegas-cheat

Claude's papers:

https://medium.com/the-mission/a-genius-explains-how-to-be-creative-claude-shannons-long-lost-1952-speech-fbbcb2ebe07f

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf

A mind at play (book links):

http://amzn.to/2pasLMz -- Hardcover

https://amzn.to/2oCfVL0 -- Audio