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Thanks, Claude Shannon

Writing for The Guardian, Alok Jha pays tribute to Claude Shannon's pioneering work in information theory, without which, he notes, we would have no internet.

Jha explains the transition from analog to digital communication and the benefits of the latter. He cites a particular equation of Shannon's and indicates how much we owe to the mathematician's insight:

Every piece of digital information is the result of codes that have been examined and improved using Shannon's equation. It has provided the mathematical underpinning for increased data storage and compression – Zip files, MP3s and JPGs could not exist without it. And none of those high-definition videos online would have been possible without Shannon's mathematics.

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Start Date: 
Thursday, July 10, 2014