The Mathematician Who Started the Digital Revolution
How Claude Shannon invented the information age.
2025-02-23 23:00:00 - Newsthink
00:00 - How Computers Understand 1s and 0s
00:35 - Growing Up in Michigan
01:20 - Boolean Logic: The Language of Computers
01:57 - Building Circuits with Math
03:09 - Working on the Differential Analyzer at MIT
04:15 - The 1937 Master’s Thesis That Changed the World
05:15 - Dabbling in Genetics
06:06 - Building War Machines (SIGSALY)
07:25 - Shannon Bell Labs
08:22 - The Birth of Information Theory (1948 Paper)
09:07 - Becoming a Celebrity Scientist
10:20 - Building Theseus, an Electronic Mouse That Learned
11:01 - Chess and Artificial Intelligence
11:28 - Juggling, Stocks, and Curiosity
11:54 - The Final Years: A Mind Lost to Alzheimer’s
13:39 - Today’s Sponsor: Brilliant