alt Hacker NewsClaude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)
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Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life.
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:
> 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.’”
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 article 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:
> “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."
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-w...
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-...
> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler...
I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.
From what I read in The Dream Machine, Shannon sounded like a super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922
Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973."
That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself.
- Turing never won the Turing Award.
- Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award.
- Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
Wayback cache url: http://web.archive.org/web/20241108095721/https://www.juggle...
And the paper Shannon wrote (pdf): https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/r...
Also Poet: https://cmrr-star.ucsd.edu/static/shannonsite/pdfs/poster.pd...
( maybe following in the footsteps of James Clerk Maxwell https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell like other Shannon ideas )
For anyone interested in the math of juggling here's a Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmCXbh-zw61C7jR2YofYx...
It's a fasincating topic that had far more complexity than I initially expected.
In my experience many mathematicians enjoy things like juggling, change ringing etc. make of it what you will I guess.
previous submission 7 years ago
It’s funny seeing Shannon as an old man. Yeah, sure, it was a long time ago and everyone gets old. For some reason, in my mind’s eye he is immortalized as the ~35yr old of his prime.
One of the photo shows his highly concentration. I have a hypothesis that many world class masters have talent to get into "Flow State". Juggling is one of the activity that associate with the state.
Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer.
It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
Feynman as well
Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s...):
He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.