Founders: #428 How Claude Shannon Worked

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Claude Shannon changed your life and you probably don't even know it. Claude is the father of information theory. He transformed information into bits and created the intellectual foundation for computers, the Internet, digital media, high-speed communication, and Artificial Intelligence. The way Claude Shannon worked is what interested me the most. He combined extraordinary abstract reasoning with an engineer’s instinct to build. He reduced complex problems to their essential structure. He connected ideas across mathematics, engineering, cryptography, artificial intelligence, investing, chess, juggling, and robotics. He treated every experience as material that he might later combine into a new insight. He was also relentlessly independent, guided more by curiosity and freedom than recognition, money, or usefulness. This episode is what I learned from rereading A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ AppLovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders 0:00 — "The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction... A genius is si

[00:00] A: The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction. Not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction, but rather a constructive dissatisfaction or a slight irritation when things don't look quite right. A genius is simply someone who is usefully irritated. A genius must delight in finding solutions. Genius must derive joy from applications of intellectual Claude Shannon once said, I get a big kick out of seeing a clever way of doing some engineering problem, a clever design for a circuit which uses a very small amount of equipment and gets a great deal of…

Founders: #428 How Claude Shannon Worked

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