A Mathematical Theory of Communication

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"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an influential 1948 article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon.

[edit] Description

Shannon's diagram of a general communication system.

The article was one of the founding works of the field of information theory. Shannon expanded the ideas of this article in a 1963 book with Warren Weaver 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 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 and redundancy, and introduced the term bit as a unit of information.

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