Cheers to 100 years! (on April 30)<p>Claude spoke at my graduation commencement from CMU years ago. As an electrical and computer engineer this was such a surprise and delight, I can hardly describe.<p>He said that commencement speeches were an opportunity for old codgers to impart pithy maxims, but that on reflection not a single pithy maxim came to mind. He came across as a genuine, self-effacing guy, full of fun.<p>If you get a chance, look again at Information Theory, it's full of gems.
I had classes with David Huffman (who worked under Fano) of Shannon-Fano coding. He was an amazing instructor.<p>My advisor was Glen Langdon who worked closely with Jorma Rissanen on arithmetic coding.<p>While not in my daily job, the knowledge spent on the challenges these relationships brought remind me of how our forbears have set foundations for us to build on.<p>I still deeply follow, but don't research in, data compression, information theory, etc.<p>The name Claude Shannon was a large part of my academic and research years.
Amazing advice from the man himself: <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774" rel="nofollow">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774</a><p>The Bandwagon - Claude Shannon
For those intrigued, the Dover edition of <i>An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise</i> by Pierce is a very good book. Accessible, but with a technically credible author.