paper · 1948
Claude Shannon · read the source
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”
Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) · Introduction · read it
Kept as the best example of a field being founded by a definition. Everything that followed, from compression to error correction, sits inside this sentence. Note the word selected, which is where the whole theory hides.
“Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”
Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) · Introduction · read it
Kept because it shows what to leave out. Shannon got a theory by refusing to care what the messages meant, which is the hardest kind of simplification: throwing away the part everyone else thinks is the point.
