Shannon was one of the first researchers to understand the value of using Boolean logic to develop binary computer languages. He also described the "Shannon limit," which set practical limits on bit rates that can be sent over analog twisted-pair phone lines.

Shannon was honored less than six months ago by the IEEE, which dedicated a statue in his honor in Gaylord, Mich., where he grew up.

Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich. in 1916. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Michigan, and went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to receive a master's and Ph.D. While at MIT, he worked under Vannevar Bush, and suggested that the binary logic of nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole be applied to early work on computers.

The first paper to address concepts of entropy, signal-to-noise ratios, and information theory was Shannon's seminal "Mathematical Theory of Communication," published in 1948 after he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories. Early communication researchers popularized Shannon's work, giving Shannon a certain degree of fame in the early 1950s. Many of his ideas were applied in such fields as cryptography, signals intelligence, antenna design and network optimization. Two years after his original 1948 paper, he collaborated with Warren Weaver on a book with the same title, which gathered several papers on information theory.

During a decade with Bell Labs and a subsequent 20 years at MIT, Shannon continued to contribute several ideas that drove modem design and analog transmission circuit concepts. Among the ideas and rules that bare his name are "Shannon Capacity," which defines bandwidth capability of a local copper loop based on encoding schemes and noise levels across the loop; and the "Shannon Limit," a way of defining communication symbols through more than one bit, thereby allowing the capacity of a channel to be limited only by signal-to-noise ratios in the channel. The Shannon Limit popularized the concept of using greater than binary modulation for information encoding, leading to the explosion of quadrature modulation and higher-order constellation modulation schemes.

David Nagel, president of AT&T Labs, said Monday (Feb. 26) that Shannon "was truly the pioneer of today's digital revolution."

Shannon also employed a sense of fun in his work, developing several toys such as motorized pogo sticks, as well as a mechanical mouse capable of negotiating a maze. He developed a chess-playing computer early in his career, and also designed one that computed in Roman numerals. Shannon was famous at Bell Labs for riding unicycles while juggling.

Last October, the IEEE Information Theory Society and the University of Michigan sponsored a ceremony in Gaylord celebrating the unveiling of a statue honoring his life. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Shannon, unveiled the statue, but Shannon was by that time too ill to attend the event.