Keywords: Claude Elwood Shannon, collected papers, collected works, mathematical theory of communication, communication theory of secrecy systems, communication in presence of noise, information theory, PCM, zero error capacity, coding with a fidelity criterion, symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits, differential analyzer, programming a computer for playing chess, artificial intelligence, Throbac, reliable circuits using less reliable relays, scientific aspects of juggling, algebra for theoretical genetics, publication list, biography.
This book contains
the collected papers of
Claude Elwood Shannon, one of the greatest scientists of the
20th century.
He is the creator of modern information theory, and an early and important contributor to the theory of computing. His pioneering work on computer chess and on "mice" that learn the path through a maze are amomg the earliest contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.
This book contains all his published work and the majority of his unpublished work (much of formerly classified as secret but now unclassified), together with notes and comments on the papers, two biographical articles (one can be seen here) and a complete publication list.
[Claude Shannon died February 24, 2001. An obituary can be found here.]
The book was edited by Neil J. A. Sloane and the late Aaron D. Wyner (both at AT&T Bell labs at the time) and published by the IEEE Press in 1993.
The illustration to the right shows the original dust-jacket.
Details:
ISBN 0-7803-0434-9, IEEE Order No. PC-03319,
xliv+ 924 pp., 1993.
Published by IEEE Press, 445 Hoes Lane, PO Box 1331, Piscataway NJ 08855, USA.
The publication of Claude Shannon's collected papers is long overdue. A substantial collection of his papers was published in Russian in 1963 (see item [121] of his Bibliography), but no English edition has ever appeared. The editors were therefore commissioned by the Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to collect and publish his papers.
Since much of Shannon's work was never published, our first task was to assemble a complete bibliography. We did this by consulting Claude and Betty Shannon, who have been extremely helpful throughout this project and supplied us with copies of a number of unpublished items; many of Claude's friends and colleagues; the Bell Laboratories Archives; the National Archives in Washington; the National Security Agency; the patent records; Mathematical Reviews; and other sources. We believe the resulting bibliography of about 127 items is reasonably complete.
The second step was to decide what to include. Our policy has been to include everything of importance. We have included all the published papers, and all the unpublished material that seemed of lasting value. Some war-time reports of very limited interest have been excluded, as well as the M.I.T. seminar notes. If an excluded paper has an abstract, we have printed it. We have made several sets of copies of the excluded material, and plan to deposit copies in the AT&T Bell Laboratories library at Murray Hill, New Jersey, the M.I.T. library, and the Library of Congress and the British Library.
The papers fall naturally into three groups: (A) communication theory, information theory and cryptography; (B) computers, circuits and games; (C) the hitherto unpublished doctoral dissertation on population genetics. Inside each group the papers are, with some exceptions, arranged in chronological order. Minor items (abstracts, book reviews, and so on) have been placed at the end of each section.
Most of the published works have been photographically reproduced from the originals, while the others have been typeset by computer at AT&T Bell Labs.
The ``Notes'' following each section give references to more recent work.
We should like to thank R. B. Blackman, P. Elias, E. N. Gilbert, R. Gnanadesikan, R. L. Graham, D. W. Hagelbarger, T. T. Kadota, H. O. Pollak, D. Slepian, E. Wolman and R. Wright for supplying us with copies of Shannon's papers. R. A. Matula, of the AT&T Bell Laboratories library staff, has been extremely helpful to us throughout this project. J. P. Buhler, J. H. Conway, J. F. Crow, R. L. Graham, D. S. Johnson, T. Nagylaki and K. Thompson kindly provided comments on some of the papers. We are very grateful to Susan Marko (sometimes assisted by Sue Pope), who expertly retyped many of Shannon's papers for us.
Introduction
Biography of Claude Elwood Shannon
Profile of Claude Shannon --- Interview by Anthony Liversidge
Bibliography of Claude Elwood Shannon
[Bracketed numbers refer to the Bibliography]
The frontispiece (reproduced below) shows Shannon at Bell Labs around 1950.
This volume includes all of Claude Elwood Shannon's writings that we did not include in the Collected Papers.
Postscript added Dec 04, 2010
Nelson H. F. Beebe (Mathematics Dept., University of Utah, Salt Lake City) wrote to me today saying:
This note is to alert you to recent additions to two bibliography
archives of BibTeX-format coverage of Claude Shannon's publications
(including some that your Web page missed), and of (almost) all
publications in the Bell System Technical Journal and its three
descendants, from the first issue in 1922 to the latest of this month
(December 2010):
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/s
and
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/index-table-b.html#bstj1920