A Mind At Play

Quotes

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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 49-52  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:48 AM

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do and, even if their genius is unrecognized in their lifetime, the essential earthly reward is always theirs, the certainty that their work is good and will stand the test of time. One suspects that the geniuses will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven—if, indeed, they ever make it; they have had their reward. —W. H. AUDEN 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 59-60  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:49 AM

After it was over, someone asked the chairman to put into perspective what had just happened. “It was,” he said, “as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 69-73  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:50 AM

Of course, information existed before Shannon, just as objects had inertia before Newton. But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits. The sender no longer mattered, the intent no longer mattered, the medium no longer mattered, not even the meaning mattered: a phone conversation, a snatch of Morse telegraphy, a page from a detective novel were all brought under a common code. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 75-80  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:51 AM

It is a puzzle of his life that someone so skilled at abstracting his way past the tangible world was also so gifted at manipulating it. Shannon was a born tinkerer: a telegraph line rigged from a barbed-wire fence, a makeshift barn elevator, and a private backyard trolley tell the story of his small-town Michigan childhood. And it was as an especially advanced sort of tinkerer that he caught the eye of Vannevar Bush—soon to become the most powerful scientist in America and Shannon’s most influential mentor—who brought him to MIT and charged him with the upkeep of the differential analyzer, an analog computer the size of a room, “a fearsome thing of shafts, gears, strings, and wheels rolling on disks” that happened to be the most advanced thinking machine of its day. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 89-94  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:52 AM

And it brought him to Bell Labs, an industrial R&D operation that considered itself less an arm of the phone company than a home for “the operation of genius.” “People did very well at Bell Labs,” said one of Shannon’s colleagues, “when they did what others thought was impossible.” Shannon’s choice of the impossible was, he wrote, “an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence, including telephony, radio, television, telegraphy, etc.”—systems that, from a mathematical perspective, appeared to have nothing essential in common until Shannon proved that they had everything essential in common. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 105-8  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:54 AM

In 1990, the Voyager 1 probe turned its camera back on Earth from the edge of the solar system, snapped a picture of our planetary home reduced in size to less than a single pixel—to what Carl Sagan called “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”—and transmitted that picture across four billion miles of void. Claude Shannon did not write the code that protected that image from error and distortion, but, some four decades earlier, he had proved that such a code must exist. And so it did. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 114-16  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:55 AM

Having completed his pathbreaking work by the age of thirty-two, he might have spent his remaining decades as a scientific celebrity, a public face of innovation: another Bertrand Russell, or Albert Einstein, or Richard Feynman, or Steve Jobs. Instead, he spent them tinkering. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 116-22  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:56 AM

An electronic, maze-solving mouse named Theseus. An Erector Set turtle that walked his house. The first plan for a chess-playing computer, a distant ancestor of IBM’s Deep Blue. The first-ever wearable computer. A calculator that operated in Roman numerals, code-named THROBAC (“Thrifty Roman-Numeral Backward-Looking Computer”). A fleet of customized unicycles. Years devoted to the scientific study of juggling. And, of course, the Ultimate Machine: a box and a switch, which, when flipped on, produced a whirring of gears and a mechanical hand that emerged from the box, flipped the switch off, and disappeared again. Claude Shannon was self-effacing in much the same way. Rarely has a thinker who devoted his life to the study of communication been so uncommunicative. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight Loc. 124-25  | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017, 01:56 AM

He worked with levity and played with gravity; he never acknowledged a distinction between the two. His genius lay above all in the quality of the puzzles he set for himself. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 197-200  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:26 AM

At a meeting of the school board it was decided not to hire any married women teachers during the coming school year due to economic conditions. It was decided that when a husband was capable of making a living it would be unfair competition to hire married women. Mrs. Mabel Shannon, Mrs. Lyons, and Mrs. Melvin Cook will be out of the school system due to this ruling. By that point, at least, there was much in her private life to occupy her. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 206-11  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:27 AM

The trees drew the lumber industry, and the first visitors and inhabitants were willing to contend with the climate for the rich cache of white pine and hardwoods. But the environment was austere, with subzero temperatures and thick lake-effect snow. A local history from 1856 concluded, perhaps self-servingly, that the harsh climate offered a brand of moral education: “The fact that [Northern Michigan’s] pioneers had more to struggle against in order to provide homes for themselves and the necessary accompaniments of homes developed in them a degree of aggressive energy which has remained as a distinct sectional possession . . . a splendid type of manhood and womanhood—self-reliant, strong, straight-forward, enterprising and moral.” 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 225-29  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:28 AM

Biographies of geniuses often open as stories of overzealous parenting. We think of Beethoven’s father, beating his son into the shape of a prodigy. Or John Stuart Mill’s father, drilling his son in Greek at the tender age of three. Or Norbert Wiener’s father, declaring to the world that he could turn anything, even a broomstick, into a genius with enough time and discipline. “Norbert always felt like that broomstick,” a contemporary later remarked. Compared to those childhoods, Shannon’s was ordinary. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 248-50  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:30 AM

Reflecting on his education with the benefit of hindsight, Shannon would say that his interest in mathematics had, besides sibling rivalry, a simple source: it just came easily to him. “I think one tends to get into work that you find easy for yourself,” Shannon acknowledged. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 252-54  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:30 AM

He loved science and disliked facts. Or rather, he disliked the kind of facts that he couldn’t bring under a rule and abstract his way out of. Chemistry in particular tested his patience. It “always seems a little dull to me,” he wrote his science teacher years after; “too many isolated facts and too few general principles for my taste.” 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 257-61  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:31 AM

On April 17, 1930, thirteen-year-old Claude attended a Boy Scout rally and won “first place in the second class wig-wag signalling contest.” The object was to speak Morse code with the body, and no scout in the county spoke it as quickly or accurately as Claude. Wig-wag was Morse code by flag: a bright signaling flag (red stands out best against the sky) on a long hickory pole. The mediocre signalers took pauses to think; the best, like Claude, had something of the machine in them. Right meant dot, left meant dash, dots and dashes meant breaks in the imaginary current that meant words; he was a human telegraph. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 265-67  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:32 AM

And the grandson inherited the tinkering gene. “As a young boy, I built many things, working with mechanical stuff,” he recalled. “Erector sets and electrical equipment, built radios, things of that sort. I remember I had a radio controlled boat.” 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 273-76  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:32 AM

Predictably, Claude grew up worshipping Thomas Edison. And yet the affinity between Edison and Claude Shannon was more than happenstance. They shared an ancestor: John Ogden, a Puritan stonemason, who crossed the Atlantic from Lancashire, England, to build gristmills and dams, and with his brother raised the first permanent church in Manhattan, 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 321-26  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:37 AM

In 1895, the then-dean of the engineering school, Charles Greene, had been asked to create plans for a new building to house the school’s growing student body. Greene’s request—$50,000 for a small, U-shaped structure—was granted. He died before he could carry out the construction, and Cooley succeeded him as dean. Asked to judge his predecessor’s plans and funding needs, Cooley replied, “Gentlemen, if you could but see the other engineering colleges with which we are forced to compete, you would not hesitate for one moment to appropriate a quarter of a million dollars.” Something about Cooley’s understated certainty swayed the board, and his request was swiftly approved. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 326-32  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:37 AM

A public exhibition in 1913 showcased the spoils of the expansion, as close as a university has probably come to something like a world’s fair. Ten thousand people came to tour the facilities and take in the latest technological marvels. Electrical engineers sent messages over a primitive wireless system. Mechanical engineers “surprised their visitors by sawing wood with a piece of paper running at 20,000 revolutions per minute, freezing flowers in liquid air, and showing a bottle supported only by two narrow wires from which a full stream of water flowed—a mystery solved by few.” Two full torpedoes, two large cannons, and “a complete electric railway with a block signal system” rounded out the demonstrations. “For the average student as well as for the casual visitor, the Engineering corner of the Campus held mysteries almost as profound as the deeper mysteries of the Medical School,” observed one writer. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 342-43  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:38 AM

Though the dual degree was common enough, Shannon’s variety of indecision, which he never entirely outgrew, would prove crucial to his later work. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 343-45  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:39 AM

Someone content to build things might have been happy with a single degree in engineering; someone drawn more to theory might have been satisfied with studying math alone. Shannon, mathematically and mechanically inclined, could not make up his mind, but the result left him trained in two fields that would prove essential to his later successes. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 346-51  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:39 AM

He joined Radio Club, Math Club, even the gymnastics team. Shannon’s records of leadership during this time are two. One is his stint as secretary of the Math Club. “A feature of all meetings,” a journal recorded, “was a list of mathematical problems placed on the board and discussed informally after the regular program. A demonstration of mathematical instruments in the department’s collection made an interesting program.” The other was news enough that the hometown paper saw fit to print it as an item of note: “Claude Shannon has been made a non-commissioned officer in the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of Michigan.” 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 351-53  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:39 AM

In the Engineering Buildings, where Claude spent the bulk of his time, his classmates tried the strength of shatterproof windshield glass, worked to muffle milk-skimming machines, floated model battleships on a sunless indoor model sea. But the real life on campus was outside the classroom. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 388-95  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:42 AM

Buoyed, we imagine, by this first success, Shannon again submitted a solution and was again published in the Monthly’s back pages, in January 1935, in answer to this problem: E 100 [1934, 390]. Proposed by G. R. Livingston, State Teachers College, San Diego, California. In two concentric circles, locate parallel chords in the outer circle which are tangent to the inner circle, by the use of compasses only, finding the ends of the chords and their points of tangency. Modest as they are, these early efforts are a window into the education of Claude Shannon. We can infer from them that the college-aged Shannon understood the value of appearing in a professional public forum, one that would earn the scrutiny of mathematicians his age and the attention of those older than him. That he was reading such a journal at all hints at more than the usual attention paid to academic matters; that his solutions were selected points to more than the usual talent. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 395-98  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:43 AM

Above all, his first publications tell us something about his growing ambition: taking time out from the usual burdens of classes and college life to study these problems, work out the answers, and prepare them for publication suggests that he already envisioned something other for himself than the family furniture business. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 398-402  | Added on Sunday, October 22, 2017, 12:43 AM

His something other would begin, in earnest, with a typed postcard tacked to an engineering bulletin board. It was an invitation to come east and help build a mechanical brain. Shannon noticed it in the spring of 1936, just as he was considering what was to come after his undergraduate days were over. The job—master’s student and assistant on the differential analyzer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—was tailor-made for a young man who could find equal joy in equations and construction, thinking and building. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 422-25  | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 01:02 AM

The man in the black suit is Vannevar Bush, and this photo marks his start. Pugnacious and perpetually time-strapped, grandson and great-grandson of Yankee whaling captains, saddled with a name so frustratingly hard to pronounce that he would instruct others to call him “Van” or even “John”—the twenty-two-year-old inventor would one day be, although he couldn’t possibly imagine it yet, the most powerful scientist in America. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 436-39  | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 01:03 AM

“The thing we know about that apple,” Vannevar Bush continued, “is, to a first approximation, that its acceleration is constant.” We can plot its fall on the chalkboard in seconds. “But suppose we want to include the resistance that air offers to the fall. This just puts another term in our equation but makes it hard to solve formally. We can still very readily solve it on a machine. We simply connect together elements, electrical or mechanical gadgets, that represent the terms of the equation, and watch it perform.” 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 448-52  | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 01:05 AM

How fast can a population of animals grow before it crashes? How long before a heap of radioactive uranium decays? How far does a magnet’s force extend? How much does a massive sun curve time and space? To ask any of these questions is to ask for the solution to a differential equation. Or, of special interest to Bush and his electrical engineering colleagues: How great a power surge could the nation’s electrical grids tolerate before they failed? Given all the wealth and work it had taken to electrify America, it was a multimillion-dollar question. 
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A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 458-62  | Added on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 01:06 AM

It turned out that most differential equations of the useful kind—the apple-falling-in-the-real-world kind, not the apple-falling-down-a-chalkboard kind—presented just the same impassable problem. These were not equations that could be solved by formulas or shortcuts, only by trial and error, or intuition, or luck. To solve them reliably—to bring the force of calculus to bear on the industrial problems of power transmission or telephone networks, or on the advanced physics problems of cosmic rays and subatomic particles—demanded an intelligence of another order.