Encyclopedia > A Mathematical Theory of Communication
The article entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", published in 1948 by mathematicianClaude E. Shannon, was one of the founding works of the field of information theory. Shannon's paper laid out the basic elements of any digital communication: Year 1948 (MCMXLVIII) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the 1948 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Leonhard Euler, considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and research is the field of mathematics. ... Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 - February 24, 2001) has been called the father of information theory, and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory. ... Not to be confused with information technology, information science, or informatics. ...
An information source which produces a message
A transmitter which operates on the message to create a signal which can be sent through a channel
A channel, which is the medium over which the signal, carrying the information that composes the message, is sent
A receiver, which transforms the signal back into the message intended for delivery
A destination, which can be a person or a machine, for whom or which the message is intended
It also developed the concepts of information entropy and redundancy. Look up signal, signaling in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Claude Shannon In information theory, the Shannon entropy or information entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable. ... Redundancy in information theory is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. ...
References
C.E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp. 379-423, 623-656, July, October, 1948
His theory for the first time considered communication as a rigorously stated mathematical problem in statistics and gave communications engineers a way to determine the capacity of a communication channel in terms of the common currency of bits.
This division of information theory into compression and transmission is justified by the information transmission theorems, or source-channel separation theorems that justify the use of bits as the universal currency for information in many contexts.
The theory is almost universally rejected by the scientific community, though some feel it might be able to create algorithms which could detect intelligence in purely naturalistic settings, and that Dembski's idea might actually have some utility, though not in the way he intended.
A basis for such a theory is contained in the important papers of Nyquist[1] and Hartley[2] on this subject.
In the present paper we will extend the theory to include a number of new factors, in particular the effect of noise in the channel, and the savings possible due to the statistical structure of the original message and due to the nature of the final destination of the information.
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.
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