Reading :: A Mind at Play

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
By Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

Just a quick review for this popular biography of Claude Shannon. I have been reading more of Max Boisot's work recently, and since it draws from Shannon, I wanted to learn a little more about him. This biography was inexpensive on Kindle, so I picked it up.

The biography is well-written, discussing Shannon's life chronologically so that we can understand the circumstances and influences surrounding his breakthroughs as well as the ways that one part of his life informed the others. Although I was most interested in these breakthroughs themselves—applying Boolean logic to circuit design, developing the study of cryptoanalysis, laying the foundation for information theory—understanding Shannon's life and the circumstances behind these breakthroughs helped me to understand his breakthroughs as well.

This was an important step. I haven't read Shannon, but I benefited directly from him in my undergraduate work as a computer science major. Later, in my Ph.D program, I heard faculty dismiss the "Shannon and Weaver model of communication" for being arhetorical, but I didn't have a good grounding in what that model was. After this book, I have a better idea, and I can see both the original problem to which he applied it and the problems that come when expanding its application to other problems. 

If you're interested in Shannon—or information theory, or codification, or just in how the information age came to be—consider picking up this book.