Newsgroup: it.comp.os.linux.iniziare
Titolo: OT (ma no troppo) E' morto Claude Shannon

Probabilmente molti lo sanno già ma posto comunque queste poche righe
per ricordare un personaggio probabilmente fra i piu' grandi della
storia della tecnologia moderna.
Scusate l'OT e il crosspost ma di fronte a certi personaggi credo si
possa fare un'eccezione alle regole.
Forse qualcuno non lo conosce ma Shannon è stato il padre della teoria
dell'informazione e quindi anche dell'informatica moderna.
Allego una  breve biografia di quest'uomo che si è guadagnato
l'immortalità con la sua opera.
By GEORGE JOHNSON
  > > > >Dr. Claude Elwood Shannon, the American mathematician and computer
  > >scientist whose theories laid the groundwork for the electronic
  > >communications networks that now lace the earth, died on Saturday
  > >in Medford, Mass., after a long fight with Alzheimer's disease. He
  > >was 84.
  > > > > Understanding, before almost anyone, the power that springs from
  > >encoding information in a simple language of 1's and 0's, Dr.
  > >Shannon as a young man wrote two papers that remain monuments in
  > >the fields of computer science and information theory.
  > > > > "Shannon was the person who saw that the binary digit was the
  > >fundamental element in all of communication," said Dr. Robert G.
  > >Gallager, a professor of electrical engineering who worked with Dr.
  > >Shannon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That was
  > >really his discovery, and from it the whole communications
  > >revolution has sprung."
  > > > > Dr. Shannon's later work on chess- playing machines and an
  > >electronic mouse that could run a maze helped create the field of
  > >artificial intelligence, the effort to make machines that think.
  > >And his ability to combine abstract thinking with a practical
  > >approach  he had a penchant for building machines  inspired a
  > >generation of computer scientists.
  > > > > Dr. Marvin Minsky of M.I.T., who as a young theorist worked
  > >closely with Dr. Shannon, was struck by his enthusiasm and
  > >enterprise. "Whatever came up, he engaged it with joy, and he
  > >attacked it with some surprising resource which might be some new
  > >kind of technical concept or a hammer and saw with some scraps of
  > >wood," Dr. Minsky said. "For him, the harder a problem might seem,
  > >the better the chance to find something new."
  > > > > Born in Petoskey, Mich., on April 30, 1916, Claude Elwood Shannon
  > >got a bachelor's degree in mathematics and electrical engineering
  > >from the University of Michigan in 1936. He got both a master's
  > >degree in electrical engineering and his Ph.D. in mathematics from
  > >M.I.T. in 1940.
  > > > > While at M.I.T., he worked with Dr. Vannevar Bush on one of the
  > >early calculating machines, the "differential analyzer," which used
  > >a precisely honed system of shafts, gears, wheels and disks to
  > >solve equations in calculus.
  > > > > Though analog computers like this turned out to be little more
  > >than footnotes in the history of the computer, Dr. Shannon quickly
  > >made his mark with digital electronics, a considerably more
  > >influential idea.
  > > > > In what has been described as one of the most important master's
  > >theses ever written, he showed how Boolean logic, in which problems
  > >can be solved by manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0, could be
  > >carried out automatically with electrical switching circuits. The
  > >symbol 1 could be represented by a switch that was turned on; 0
  > >would be a switch that was turned off.
  > > > > The thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,"
  > >was largely motivated by the telephone industry's need to find a
  > >mathematical language to describe the behavior of the increasingly
  > >complex switching circuits that were replacing human operators. But
  > >the implications of the paper were far more broad, laying out a
  > >basic idea on which all modern computers are built.
  > > > > George Boole, the 19th-century British mathematician who invented
  > >the two-symbol logic, grandiosely called his system "The Laws of
  > >Thought." The idea was not lost on Dr. Shannon, who realized early
  > >on that, as he once put it, a computer is "a lot more than an
  > >adding machine." The binary digits could be used to represent
  > >words, sounds, images  perhaps even ideas.
  > > > > The year after graduating from M.I.T., Dr. Shannon took a job at
  > >AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he became known for
  > >keeping to himself by day and riding his unicycle down the halls at
  > >night.
  > > > > "Many of us brought our lunches to work and played mathematical
  > >blackboard games," said a former colleague, Dr. David Slepian.
  > >"Claude rarely came. He worked with his door closed, mostly. But if
  > >you went in, he would be very patient and help you along. He could
  > >grasp a problem in zero time. He really was quite a genius. He's
  > >the only person I know whom I'd apply that word to."
  > > > > In 1948, Dr. Shannon published his masterpiece, "A Mathematical
  > >Theory of Communication," giving birth to the science called
  > >information theory. The motivation again was practical: how to
  > >transmit messages while keeping them from becoming garbled by
  > >noise.
  > > > > To analyze this problem properly, he realized, he had to come up
  > >with a precise definition of information, a dauntingly slippery
  > >concept. The information content of a message, he proposed, has
  > >nothing to do with its content but simply with the number of 1's
  > >and 0's that it takes to transmit it.
  > > > > This was a jarring notion to a generation of engineers who were
  > >accustomed to thinking of communication in terms of sending
  > >electromagnetic waveforms down a wire. "Nobody had come close to
  > >this idea before," Dr. Gallager said. "This was not something
  > >somebody else would have done for a very long time."
  > > > > The overarching lesson was that the nature of the message did not
  > >matter  it could be numbers, words, music, video. Ultimately it
  > >was all just 1's and 0's.
  > > > > Today, when gigabytes of movie trailers, Napster files and e-mail
  > >messages course through the same wires as telephone calls, the idea
  > >seems almost elemental. But it has its roots in Dr. Shannon's
  > >paper, which may contain the first published occurrence of the word
  > >"bit."
  > > > > Dr. Shannon also showed that if enough extra bits were added to a
  > >message, to help correct for errors, it could tunnel through the
  > >noisiest channel, arriving unscathed at the end. This insight has
  > >been developed over the decades into sophisticated error-correction
  > >codes that ensure the integrity of the data on which society
  > >interacts.
  > > > > In later years, his ideas spread beyond the fields of
  > >communications engineering and computer science, taking root in
  > >cryptography, the mathematics of probability and even investment
  > >theory. In biology, it has become second nature to think of DNA
  > >replication and hormonal signaling in terms of information.
  > > > > And more than one English graduate student has written papers
  > >trying to apply information theory to literature  the kind of
  > >phenomenon that later caused Dr. Shannon to complain of what he
  > >called a "bandwagon effect."
  > > > > "Information theory has perhaps ballooned to an importance beyond
  > >its actual accomplishments," he lamented.
  > > > > After he moved to M.I.T. in 1958, and beyond his retirement two

Cesare Fontana wrote:
scusate... ho tagliato la parte finale
After he moved to M.I.T. in 1958, and beyond his retirement two
 > >decades later, he pursued a diversity of interests a mathematical
 > >theory of juggling, an analog computer programmed to beat roulette,
 > >a system for playing the stock market using probability theory.
 > > > > He is survived by his wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore Shannon; a son,
 > >Andrew Moore Shannon; a daughter, Margarita Shannon; a sister,
 > >Catherine S. Kay; and two granddaughters.
 > > > > In the last years of his life, Alzheimer's disease began to set
 > >in. "Something inside him was getting lost," Dr. Minsky said. "Yet
 > >none of us miss him the way you'd expect for the image of that
 > >great stream of ideas still persists in everyone his mind ever
 > >touched."