C.E. SHANNON – SCIENTIST, THINKER, PERSON (ON THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY)

Abstract

The article presents the scientific biography of the outstanding scientist-mathematician and cybernetist Claude Elwood Shannon. It describes the life course of the scientist, his studies at the University of Michigan, the history of writing the master's thesis "Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" and his doctoral dissertation "The Algebra of Theoretical Genetics". The main attention is paid to Shannon's works on information theory. A lot of space is also devoted to recreating the image of Shannon – a scientist and a person. Article tells about the specifics of the scientific world before the Second World War and during the war, during the Cold War and subsequent detente. The main method of writing the article was the critical use of the numerous memories about Shannon left by his teachers, colleagues and students, and an analysis of the principal works of the scientist on the theory of switching circuits, theoretical genetics and information theory. The use of this method allowed us to reveal many important topics related to the life and work of Shannon: the fields of science that the scientist created or into which he made a significant (decisive) contribution, the peculiarity of the creative method of the scientist, etc. The novelty and relevance of the article consists in establishing the contribution that C.E. Shannon gives to the creation of two new sciences: cybernetics (his work on the application of logic to the analysis of switching circuits) and the general theory of communication (his work on information theory). Shannon also made a great contribution to the methodology of scientific research, which consisted in the universalization of the method of mathematical modeling, which made it possible to make mathematical modeling the main method of research in various fields of science and technology.