Everything Jimmy Soni said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Betty Shannon did uncredited math work on Claude Shannon's early papers
“A lot of his earliest papers are in her handwriting and she would do the math, do the intervening math, she would challenge him, she would include historical references, literary references in papers, and she never got any credit for this,”
Claude Shannon mathematically proved the security of the one-time pad
“I believe it's called a mathematical theory of cryptography. And he proves the existence of a one-time pad the existence of an unbreakable code.”
Bell Labs math researchers had total autonomy over problem selection
“He joins the mathematical research group, and they basically go around cherry-picking the problems that they would like to solve, and they don't have to do anything they don't want to do.”
Pairing academic mathematicians with engineers amplifies corporate R&D problem solving
“Realizes that there are a bunch of academic mathematicians who don't want to stay in academia and you don't really know what to do with them. And he sort of says, well, if you invite them in and attach them to engineers, attach them to physicists, They can hel…”
Practical applications of Shannon's information theory only emerged in the 1980s
“What we take from the paper only starts to matter in the eighties. And so at the time, this was still a discussion very much in theory, but the power and force of his theory was immediately seen.”
Claude Shannon avoided the WWII draft via a Bell Labs contract
“Those mentors get him a wartime contract working at Bell Laboratories that spares him from the draft.”
Shannon outlined information theory to Vannevar Bush 10 years before publishing
“He actually wrote a note to Vannevar Bush first Suggesting that he was working on this, that the theory that all messages or all communications were essentially the same. This is 10 years before he ever publishes the paper.”
Claude Shannon authored his landmark 1948 paper without any collaborators
“He had no collaborators of any kind and that it was published in two, two sections within the Bell Technical Journal, the Bell Systems Technical Journal.”
Steve Jobs personally assembled and sent an Apple II to Claude Shannon
“Steve Jobs actually sends the Shannons he assembles an Apple II and sends it to Claude. So they have one of the only Apple IIs, I guess, that was assembled by Steve Jobs himself.”
Claude Shannon built a childhood telegraph using barbed wire
“So he rigs up a barbed wire telegraph between his house and a friend's house.”
the a16z Podcast 1