
Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius - breck
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/betty-shannon-unsung-mathematical-genius/
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68c12c16
Thanks for sharing this article...not familiar with Betty Shannon, but her
husband, Claude Shannon was really a genius...His paper "A Mathematical Theory
of Communication" is one of the most elegant papers that I have read...

[http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...](http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf)

Sigh...the one hundred years before 1990 was really a period of giants, with
Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Emmy Noether, David
Hilbert -- as well as Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie and the
other quantum guys...

I have to admit it was those guys that inspired me to try to pursue a career
in academia...but after I grew up, I found they were all dead -- or it might
be the other way around...and many academic papers these days are filled with
words that do not resonant, and with bloated references that do not shine --
some even marked with the acceptance rate of its publication to show off their
elitism...

Seems that the age when a 25-page PhD thesis, containing only 2 references,
could still be well accepted is fading further and further away...

( [https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-
Cooperati...](https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-
Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf) )

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jonnybgood
> Sigh...the one hundred years before 1990 was really a period of giants, with
> Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Emmy Noether,
> David Hilbert -- as well as Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie
> and the other quantum guys...

Most of giants of that period are giants in hindsight. We can see the results
of their work and how those results still hold up today. I imagine those in
2117 will have their giants between 1990 and 2090 just like we do today.

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qq66
Yes, but because human knowledge is so much greater than it was 100 years ago,
a given lifetime of work is able to push knowledge forward less. Yes, we still
have CRISPRs and other titanic discoveries, but even those are collaborations.
There is no more room for an Isaac Newton who basically invents three
different scientific fields.

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nostrademons
A field depends on the body of work that comes afterwards. At the time of its
invention, it's just a paper. I could imagine several people in computing
alone that might end up inventing three different fields.

Remember that at one point, "computer science" was considered a subfield of
"electrical engineering", and both of them have their roots in Claude
Shannon's masters thesis. That's because after he published his result and it
became widely known, thousands of others piled into those fields to study the
consequences of digital circuits. Similarly, I'd bet that in a hundred years
"computer science" isn't one field, it's at least half a dozen, and people
will be studying the subfields of version control, distributed systems, CRDTs,
neural nets, computer graphics, data storage, compression, information
retrieval, and others. Actually, that isn't a hundred years, that's today.

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cedex12
> I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up
> inventing three different fields.

I'm curious, who would those be?

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pelario
Newtonian physics, Gravitational theory and Differential calculus.

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empath75
At the time it was all just "natural philosophy."

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fudgeUalz
I read Mathematical Theory of Communication at a dear professor's request. It
blew me completely away, if only because it was so simple (elegant?) and easy
to follow, but ground breaking. Spent a semester debating switching from cs to
pure mathematics because of that paper. Kind of wish I had.

Shannon died in 2001 in a nursing home from Alzheimer disease. Knowing that
fills me with such a deep sadness, and a dash of complete panic at the
reminder that shit just ain't fair.

Fuck Alzheimers.

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tzs
> Even Shannon’s passions for investing and studying the stock market started
> with Betty. She became intrigued by the market and filled the home library
> with books on investment strategies and economics

Nowadays for many people it would be her browser's bookmarks and history
getting filled with links to investment and economics sites and articles,
rather than the home library getting filled with books.

I wonder if that makes it less common for one's interests to spread to others
in the house?

With books, they get left around in living areas, ready to easily enthrall
others who pick them up out of idle curiosity. When put away they are probably
in bookshelves shared with others.

With bookmarked links there would be less opportunity to stumble across
someone else's bookmarks. Everyone's bookmark list is on their own account, or
even their own device.

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spyhi
I doubt it's much different. Sure, the content itself is more invisible, but
social dynamics are probably a more important factor to spread. I know if I
notice my wife engrossed in something on her phone or computer, I'm gonna ask
her what she's found just out of sheer curiosity, and that's if she doesn't
bring it up first. Conversely, if I'm fascinated by something, I'm gonna tell
my wife (even if she doesn't care, much to her chagrin), and I'm gonna tell
'errbody who I think might have even a passing interest. Maybe we are unique
in this regard, but I suspect not, given the success of everything from
StumbleUpon to Delicious to Facebook...humans are just wired to share with
each other.

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unexistance
* reads wiki, dissapointed

anyway, favorite quote

 _They would work side by side. Betty looked up references, took down Claude’s
thoughts and, importantly, edited his written work. She offered her
improvements and added historical references. As Betty put it, “Some of his
early papers and even later papers are in my handwriting...and not in his,
which confused people at first.” And not just his papers: Betty was a full
partner in the gadgeteering, too. In fact, it was Betty—not Claude—who
completed the wiring for Theseus the mouse._

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lambdaphagy
The title and general coverage is actually pretty insulting to Betty Shannon,
and suggests that we're scraping the bottom of the women in STEM barrel pretty
hard, aren't we?

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pmoriarty
_" "[Shannon] didn't have much patience with people who weren't as smart as he
was." It is telling that Shannon's few friends were themselves some of the
era's greatest intellects: Alan Turing, John Pierce, Barney Oliver, Vannevar
Bush."_

Did Shannon ever meet von Neumann?

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tnecniv
Yes, they were at IAS at the same time, along with Weyl, Einstein, and Godel.
I think he met the latter two a few times but did not work with them. He did
discuss ideas with Weyl and von Neumann, though.

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jbandlow
For more on Shannon, "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the
Information Age" is a recent book by the same authors (which I very much
enjoyed).

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arnioxux
They also did a very thorough AMA on reddit recently:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/6pa11p/we_spent_5_yea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/6pa11p/we_spent_5_years_studying_claude_shannonthe/)

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robinhouston
I'm really enjoying the new biography of Shannon this article is based on.
(The authors were kind enough to send me a promo copy.)

It's amazing that such a central and fascinating figure hasn't had a book-
length biography before now.

