<story><title>A Mathematical Theory of Communication [pdf]</title><url>https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ImageXav</author><text>If anyone is on the fence about reading this, or worried about their ability to comprehend the content, I would tell you to go ahead and give it a chance. Shannon&amp;#x27;s writing is remarkably lucid and transparent. The jargon is minimal, and his exposition is fantastic.&lt;p&gt;As many other commentators has mentioned, it is impressive that such an approachable paper would lay the foundations for a whole field. I actually find that many subsequent textbooks seem to obfuscate the simplicity of the idea of entropy.&lt;p&gt;Two examples from the paper really stuck with me. In one, he discusses the importance of spaces for encoding language, something which I had never really considered before. In the second, he discusses how it is the redundancy of language that allows for crosswords, and that a less redundant language would make it harder to design these (unless we started making them 3D!). It made me think more deeply about communication as a whole.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Mathematical Theory of Communication [pdf]</title><url>https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shalabhc</author><text>While well known for this paper and &amp;quot;information theory&amp;quot;, Shannon&amp;#x27;s master&amp;#x27;s thesis* is worth checking out as well. It demonstrated some equivalence between electrical circuits and boolean algebra, and was one of the key ideas that enabled digital computers.&lt;p&gt;* &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;A_Symbolic_Analysis_of_Relay_and_Switching_Circuits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;A_Symbolic_Analysis_of_Relay_a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>