Comments on: Claude Shannon https://www.isegoria.net/2016/04/claude-shannon/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:00:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: Dan Kurt https://www.isegoria.net/2016/04/claude-shannon/comment-page-1/#comment-2468632 Dan Kurt Sun, 01 May 2016 15:34:00 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=40179#comment-2468632 A year of so after Sputnik, while in high school, I took a course (sans lab) in the evenings twice a week for my first three college credits: Circuits 1. We started with about 200 high school students from all over the city, and at the end there were less than 15 of us, as this was before grade inflation. Money was flowing into the hard sciences and students were encouraged to become engineers and scientists, so those credits were free to me. There is where I met the esteemed Claude Shannon. The professor handed out copies of his brief article; as I recall it was no more than three pages, if that, on Boolean Algebra and logic circuits.

I next encountered Boolean Algebra in a math course in college in the early 1960s when, in the days before computers and calculators, it was one part of a three-part course: Number Theory, Boolean Algebra, and Linear Algebra. In that course Claude Shannon was not even mentioned, as the mathematicians had no insight into electrical engineering and the digital revolution that was boiling up, changing the world.

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