Information theory
Teoría de la información
- Date
- 1948 · confidence high
- Place
- Murray Hill, New Jersey (Bell Labs), United States
- Credited to
- Claude Shannon (A Mathematical Theory of Communication)
- People
- 👤 Claude Elwood Shannon1916–2001
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Mathematical definition of information (bit, entropy), the source coding theorem (compression limit) and the noisy-channel coding theorem (capacity, the existence of near-perfect codes). It set the theoretical limits of all digital communication.
Shannon had already shown in 1938 that Boolean algebra describes switching circuits; Hamming published the first error-correcting codes in 1950 at the same laboratory.
What it led to
- coding theory (Hamming, Reed-Solomon, turbo, LDPC)
- data compression
- modern cryptography (perfect secrecy)
- Kolmogorov complexity
- computational neuroscience
- Data compression (ZIP, MP3, JPEG) and error-correcting codes
- The design of modems, mobile networks and space communications
- Modern cryptography and genetics as information
Built on
- Electric telegraph1837
- Boolean algebra1847-1854
- Nyquist and Hartley
- Boltzmann and Gibbs statistical mechanics
- telegraphy
- wartime cryptographic work
Made possible
- Noisy-channel coding theorem1948
- Shannon–Hartley theorem1949
- Error-correcting codes (Hamming, Reed-Solomon)1950-1960
- Lempel-Ziv data compression1977
- GSM digital mobile telephony (2G)1991
- Polar codes2008-2009
- internet
- CDs, DVDs and hard drives
- space communications
- Hamming and Reed-Solomon codes
- digital communications
- 5G