"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an article by

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

Claude E. Shannon published in ''

Bell System Technical Journal The ''Bell Labs Technical Journal'' is the in-house scientific journal for scientists of Nokia Bell Labs, published yearly by the IEEE society. The managing editor is Charles Bahr. The journal was originally established as the ''Bell System Tech ...

'' in 1948. It was renamed ''The Mathematical Theory of Communication'' in the 1949 book of the same name, a small but significant title change after realizing the generality of this work. It became one of the most cited scientific articles and gave rise to the field of

information theory Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. ...

Publication

The article was the founding work of the field of information theory. It was later published in 1949 as a book titled ''The Mathematical Theory of Communication'' (), which was published as a

paperback A paperback (softcover, softback) book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardcover (hardback) books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, ...

in 1963 (). The book contains an additional article by

Warren Weaver Warren Weaver (July 17, 1894 – November 24, 1978) was an American scientist, mathematician, and science administrator. He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation and as an important figure in creating support for scien ...

, providing an overview of the theory for a more general audience.

Shannon's article laid out the basic elements of communication: *An information source that produces a message *A transmitter that 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, and introduced the term bit (which Shannon credited to

John Tukey John Wilder Tukey (; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distributi ...

) as a unit of information. It was also in this paper that the

Shannon–Fano coding In the field of data compression, Shannon–Fano coding, named after Claude Shannon and Robert Fano, is a name given to two different but related techniques for constructing a prefix code based on a set of symbols and their probabilities (estimat ...

technique was proposed – a technique developed in conjunction with

Robert Fano Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a student and worki ...

References

External links

(PDF) "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" by C. E. Shannon
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Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

Khan Academy video about "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mathematical Theory of Communication 1963 non-fiction books Information theory Computer science books Mathematics books Mathematics papers Works originally published in American magazines 1948 documents Works originally published in science and technology magazines Texts related to the history of the Internet Claude Shannon

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