| A Mathematical Theory of Communication | |
| Author: | Claude E. Shannon |
| Orig Lang Code: | en |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Subject: | Communication theory |
| Pub Date: | 1948 |
"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948.[1] [2] It was renamed The Mathematical Theory of Communication in the 1949 book of the same name, a small but significant title change after realizing the generality of this work. It has tens of thousands of citations which is rare for a scientific article and gave rise to the field of information theory. Scientific American referred to the paper as the "Magna Carta of the Information Age",[3] while the electrical engineer Robert G. Gallager called the paper a "blueprint for the digital era".[4] Historian James Gleick rated the paper as the most important development of 1948, placing the transistor second in the same time period, with Gleick emphasizing that the paper by Shannon was "even more profound and more fundamental" than the transistor.[5]
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, which was published as a paperback in 1963 . The book contains an additional article by Warren Weaver, providing an overview of the theory for a more general audience.[6]
This work is known for introducing the concepts of channel capacity as well as the noisy channel coding theorem.
Shannon's article laid out the basic elements of communication:
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. It was also in this paper that the Shannon–Fano coding technique was proposed – a technique developed in conjunction with Robert Fano.