Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue:<p>> In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’”<p>So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an <i>article</i> about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory:<p>> “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications."<p>[0] <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-with-his-Alzheimers-disease" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-w...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-and-father-of-information-theory" rel="nofollow">https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-...</a>