The Idea Factory was a pretty enlightening book. I never realized how important Bell Labs was in our technological history. They purposely sought out the best minds and gave them freedom to find the next great tech.
And when the prospect of losing the cold war is breathing down your neck you go right ahead and renew visas of those making an important contribution..?
The Idea Factory was excellent and really delves into the nuance of topics many of us see as black and white (government regulation vs. laissez-faire capitalism, monopolies vs. competition, pure vs. applied research)
The author also does a great job at making his subjects come alive. You really get a feel for the great minds of years past who have often stumbled in the dark before coming up with brilliant theories that we all still rely on.
Had to open the link out of curiosity just to confirm this. It's a Vimeo embed, but it doesn't show a volume button! Pressing [?] shows the up/down arrow keys control volume, but I can't confirm it does because my computer doesn't have sound.
Shannon was certainly one of the great scientists. His paper "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" [1] is on the one hand accessible but profound. His derivation of entropy and the the limits of communication over a noisy channel are almost simple but I believe this is true only because of hindsight and is, in my opinion, the hallmark of a deep idea.
We've only recently been able to get close to the Shannon limit with Turbo Codes [2] and Low Parity Density Checks (LPDC) [3].
For anyone interested, I wrote a short post on deriving entropy and channel capacity [4].
Unfortunately it would be hard to ask him directly as to why but a good proxy is to listen to one of his colleagues, Richard Hamming explain. https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw. He mentions Claude around the 4:30 mark.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadThe author also does a great job at making his subjects come alive. You really get a feel for the great minds of years past who have often stumbled in the dark before coming up with brilliant theories that we all still rely on.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Informatio...
This is also a good read:
http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-v...
We've only recently been able to get close to the Shannon limit with Turbo Codes [2] and Low Parity Density Checks (LPDC) [3].
For anyone interested, I wrote a short post on deriving entropy and channel capacity [4].
[1] http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_code
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-density_parity-check_code
[4] https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Shannon-Entropy/