(1948) Physics Named after the American applied mathematician and pioneer of information theory Claude Elwood Shannon (1916– ).
Information theory is concerned with the encoding, transmitting and interpretation of messages. Shannon proposed a purely mathematical definition of information for any probability distribution within a system, and used this definition to calculate the probability of the information being found amongst the random noise. Shannon borrowed the concept of entropy from statistical mechanics as a way of expressing the degree of uncertainty present in the information.
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