A Mathematical Theory of Communication

Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper that founded information theory. Published in the Bell System Technical Journal, it introduced the concept of “bits” as a unit of information and established the mathematical foundations for digital communication.

Shannon showed that any communication channel has a maximum capacity (measured in bits per second) and that it’s possible to transmit data reliably at rates approaching this limit using appropriate encoding schemes.

The paper deliberately sidesteps the question of meaning, focusing only on the statistical properties of messages. This was both its greatest strength (making the math tractable) and its greatest limitation (leaving semantics for future generations to figure out).

Links:

• PDF from Harvard
• Mirror: 1948.10-shannon-entropy.pdf