Claude Shannon's Masters Thesis was on the application of Boolean Algebra to circuits, effectively founding digital circuit design. That should have been enough for anyone, but not for Shannon. His later work on Information theory has proven important in everything from evolution to quantum mechanics (particularly, relative quantum entropy) and perhaps even to future physics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1fz5NLjQs).
He also did early work in cryptanalysis, AI (minimax chess algorithm and a learning robotic mouse). His student was Ivan Sutherland. More or less, whether its networking, signal processing, compression, crypto, machine learning, circuit design, basically anything to do with the digital age, you'll find Shannon did important foundational work there.
If I recall, Turing actually started to formalize some ideas in information theory, but stopped after meeting Shannon. Shannon showed Turing his information theory work and Turing decided Shannon already solved the question he was interested in.
It is a shame shannon doesn't get the recognition he deserves. Computer science has many fathers and as amazing as Turing was, nobody contributed more and nobody has a better claim to call himself the father of computer science than Shannon. Not Turing. Not Church. He outstrips them all but nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him.
Just two nights ago, on Amazon Prime streaming, I watched the very good show "BBC Order And Disorder Episode 2 - Information" hosted by the excellent Jim Al-Khalili. He profiles Alan Turing and says that Turing was only half the story and then introduces Claude Shannon—a name with which I was unfamiliar—and Bell Labs. Great stuff.
Great documentary. I can heartily recommend all of Al-Khalili's documentaries: "Atom", "The End of the Universe", "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity" and "Chemistry: A Volatile History" are all excellent. The last two are my favorites; while his documentaries on physics and quantum mechanics are good, they describe scientific phenomena that are pretty difficult to understand, let alone visualize, and it ends up having to be a little over-simplified, or explained with unsatisfying visual analogies. The ones on chemistry and electricity are a lot more (no pun intended) grounded, and include some fun demonstrations.
Thank you. I discovered last night that some of the shows you mention are not on amazon Prime. Only the more astronomical and physics-related ones are (Gravity; Order/Disorder; Everything/Nothing; Beginning/End of the Universe).
Shannon came up much more than Turing during undergrad for electrical engineering. Can't learn signal processing, information theory, discrete math, etc without mentioning him. Perhaps he falls in the EE/ECE realm more than CS
Actually, I think Shannon might be more known than Turing.
Pretty much anyone doing signal processing, which is part of the standard physics curriculum where I'm from, will be introduced to the Nyquist–Shannon theorem while Church and Turing did fundational work in logic and computability but with far less practical application.
I am willing to grant you that a random person off the street is more likely to have heard of Turing than Shannon. But much more likely still to have heard of Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or James Watson.
Public awareness of scientists drops off very quickly. That’s just the way life works. It’s lucky enough if random people off the street have heard of small countries or political leaders of their own country. Most people don’t remember most of the major genocides of the past few decades.
Shannon is without question one of the best known (by the general public) 30 or 50 scientists of the 20th century. It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him. At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea.
But not everyone can capture the public imagination the way (say) Einstein did.
> It is ridiculous to pretend that nobody has heard of him.
> At the very least anyone with a STEM degree will have some idea.
You've berated the parent for saying - obviously figuratively - "nobody outside of the computer science world has heard of him", then conceded that having a STEM degree would make a significant difference to the likelihood of whether someone knows of him.
It's a benign thing to trigger such an outburst, especially given there's so little substantive difference between your positions.
For what it's worth, I'm a self-taught software developer of 15+ years' experience and I've consumed plenty of material about science and scientific history - but without any academic STEM study.
I hadn't heard of him - at least to the extent that I remember.
Whereas of course I know plenty about Turing.
And for what it's worth I know much more of Turing's life than Hawking's, Goodall's or Watson's.
The question of how many non-CS/STEM-qualified people have heard about him is an interesting one to explore, and it can do without the poisonous tone you've introduced.
There are thousands of important mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer scientists, etc. languishing in obscurity who don’t get the credit they deserve.
Shannon, as one of the best known and most celebrated scholars (in any field) of the 20th century, and by any reasonable standard a scientific superstar, is not one of them.
It’s like saying “Le Corbusier doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Nobody outside architecture has heard of him. Everyone knows Frank Lloyd Wright, but what about Le Corbusier?!” Or “Carl Jung doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Nobody outside of psychiatry has heard of him. Everyone knows Sigmund Freud, but what about Jung?!”
Pick whatever field you want, and I’m sure you can find a list of seminal figures who are well known to anyone with basic knowledge of the field (say, anyone who took an intro course in college) and familiar to anyone with broad cultural education, but not as recognizable to the man on the street as top athletes or rock stars. Claiming that these people are unrecognized or unheard of is absurd.
Your comparison to Freud and Jung refutes the very point you're trying to make.
I have approximately the same (quite high) level of lay-person interest in psychology as I do in science, and I know more about Jung than I do about Freud.
On Jung's Wikipedia page, the "In Popular Culture" section contains 19 items. Freud's page doesn't have such a section - though of course he is still very well known in the mainstream, but not materially more so than Jung.
Turing's "Portrayal" section on his Wikipedia page contains 14 items across theatre, literature, music and film. No comparable section exists for Shannon, and you couldn't create one that would come close to Turing's.
This is all that your parent was trying to say. Not that Shannon is unrecognised within his field or "less recognizable to the man on the street as top athletes or rock stars", but less recognised in mainstream culture than fellow computer scientist Alan Turing.
Returning to your original comment:
> Yeah! Nobody has heard of that guy. His Mathematical Theory of Communication only has 112 thousand (!!!) google scholar citations, apparently the #4 most cited paper of all time in any field (#1–3, 5–9 are biochem/chem papers, and #10 is clinical psych).
> For comparison, Turing has 5 papers with 10–12k citations each.
The _entire point_ your parent was trying to make was that Shannon is vastly more credentialed and recognized within his field, yet little known in the mainstream.
Why get so worked up over a point on which there's basically no substantive disagreement?
It's probably the case that there are no scientists besides maybe Einstein (E = mc^2) and Newton (apple falling from the tree -> gravity) that the general public would be able to identify by name and refer to one thing that very roughly approximates what they did.
Who knows though, given the public's enthusiasm for modern tech and its stars (Jobs, Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc.) maybe one day scientists' work might make a "Casey's Top 40"-like popular countdown if presented the right way!
He also did early work in cryptanalysis, AI (minimax chess algorithm and a learning robotic mouse). His student was Ivan Sutherland. More or less, whether its networking, signal processing, compression, crypto, machine learning, circuit design, basically anything to do with the digital age, you'll find Shannon did important foundational work there.