A Mathematical Theory of Communication

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an influential^[1][2] 1948 article^[3][4] by mathematician Claude E. Shannon. It was renamed "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the book,^[5] a small but significant title change after realizing the generality of this work.

Description

Shannon's diagram of a general communications system, which shows the process that produces a message.

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 (ISBN 0-252-72546-8), which was published as a paperback in 1963 (ISBN 0-252-72548-4). The book contains an additional article by Warren Weaver, 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) as a unit of information.

References

1. Robert B. Ash. Information Theory. New York: Interscience, 1965. ISBN 0-470-03445-9. New York: Dover 1990. ISBN 0-486-66521-6, p. v
2. Yeung, R. W. (2008). "The Science of Information". Information Theory and Network Coding. pp. 1–01. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-79234-7_1. ISBN 978-0-387-79233-0.
3. • Shannon, Claude E. (July 1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Bell System Technical Journal 27 (3): 379–423. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.
4. • Shannon, Claude E. (October 1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Bell System Technical Journal 27 (4): 623–656. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb00917.x.
5. Claude E. Shannon, Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Univ of Illinois Press, 1949. ISBN 0-252-72548-4

External links

• The full article, hosted by IEEE