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A Mathematical Theory of Communication

 

 
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A Mathematical Theory of Communication
 
 
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"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an influential 1948 article by mathematician
Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and/or research is the field of mathematics....
 Claude E. Shannon.








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"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an influential 1948 article by mathematician
Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and/or research is the field of mathematics....
 Claude E. Shannon.

Description

The article was one of the founding works of the field of information theory
Information theory

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Historically, information theory was developed by Claude E....
. Shannon expanded the ideas of this article in a 1963 book with Warren Weaver
Warren Weaver

Warren Weaver was an United States scientist, mathematician, and science administrator. He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation, and as an important figure in creating support for science in the United States....
 titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication (ISBN 0-25-272548-4). Shannon's article laid out the basic elements of communication:

  • An information source that produces a message
  • A transmitter that operates on the message to create a signal
    Signal (electrical engineering)

    In the fields of telecommunications, signal processing, and in electrical engineering more generally, a signal is any time-varying or spatial-varying quantity....
     which can be sent through a channel
  • A channel, which is the medium over which the signal, carrying the information that composes the message, is sent
  • A receiver, which transforms the signal back into the message intended for delivery
  • A destination, which can be a person or a machine, for whom or which the message is intended


It also developed the concepts of information entropy
Information entropy

In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable. The term by itself in this context usually refers to the Shannon entropy, which quantifies, in the sense of an expected value, the self-information contained in a message, usually in units such as bits....
 and redundancy
Redundancy (information theory)

Redundancy in information theory is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message....
, and introduced the term bit
Bit

A bit is a binary numeral system numerical digit, taking a value of either 0 or 1. Binary digits are a basic unit of information Computer data storage and transmission in digital computing and digital information theory....
 as a unit of information.

See also

  • Communications system
    Communications system

    In telecommunication, a communications system is a collection of individual information transfer networks, transmission systems, relay stations, tributary stations, and data terminal equipment usually capable of interconnection and interoperation to form an integrated whole....