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| Claude Shannon, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026 |
I was recently commissioned to make a portrait of Claude Shannon. It seemed clear that it would need some binary to represent his work, and the math and computer science in particular. I opted to also include Theseus in his maze, which hits on the electrical engineering, and the humour in what he did.
This is my linocut portrait of Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001), mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer credited with laying the foundations for the Information Age. Each hand-printed linocut on 11" x 14" Japanese kozo (or mulberry paper) shows Shannon in front of binary numbers and with his electromechanical mouse Theseus with its maze. Though partially behind him, the binary numbers represent the standard ASCII code for "CLAUDESHANNON".
At the University of Michigan, he took two degrees: one in electrical engineering and the second in mathematics, graduating in 1936. His MIT masters thesis is arguably one of the most impactful ever completed. In it, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", he showed that we can construct any logical numerical relationship through the electrical applications of Boolean algebra. This is now the underlying theoretical basis for digital computing and digital circuits. He completed his doctorate at MIT in 1940 on mathematical genetics.
During WWII he worked in the field of cryptanalysis for US national defence, doing fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications, and writing a paper which is considered one of the foundational pieces of modern symmetric-key cryptography.
His 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" laid the foundations for the field of information theory. This paper was important to the invention of the compact disc, the internet, mobile phones and even our understanding of blackholes. He introduced the term "bit," invented the signal-flow graph and co-invented pulse-code modulation and the first wearable computer.
In 1950, he designed and built a learning machine, with the help of his wife mathematician and research collaborator Betty Shannon. They built an adjustable maze with sensors (an electromechanical relay circuit) which followed the path of an electromechanical mouse whimsically named Theseus. Theseus could search corridors until it found a target (the penny in my portrait). Then, the mouse could be moved to anywhere in the maze. If the location was known, it would go immediately to the target. If the location was unknown, the mouse would search until it found a known position, adding this knowledge to its memory, and proceed from the known position. This way it could eventually find the most direct route. This is the first known artificial learning device.
In 1951 he joined the CIA's Special Cryptologic Advisory Group. He was a professor at MIT from 1956 to 1978. His work was also foundational for artificial intelligence. He was a co-organizer of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, considered to be the discipline's founding event. He published papers on the programming of chess computers. His Theseus machine was the first electrical device to learn by trial and error, being one of the first examples of artificial intelligence.
