Claude Shannon
The Bell Labs mathematician who showed that information can be measured, one bit at a time.
Books
The Mathematical Theory of Communication1949His 1948 paper, with an essay by Warren Weaver that walks through the same ideas in plain words.
Mentioned in
How AI guesses the next word
How does a program that only guesses the next word write sentences people believe? The story starts with Betty Shannon guessing a sentence one letter at a time, and reaches a lawyer who handed a court six cases that never existed.