The classic that is the basis for modern information theory. ( )

This is arguably the single most influential work of the 20th century. ( )

Few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Claude Shannon's major precept, that all communication is essentially digital, is now so commonplace among the modern digitalia that many wonder why Shannon needed to state such an obvious axiom.

Long regarded as a classic, The Mathematical Theory of Communication appears here in a special fiftieth anniversary edition.

"Before this there was no universal way of measuring the complexity of messages or the capabilities of circuits to transmit them. Shannon gave us a mathematical way . . . invaluable . . . to scientists and engineers the world over." -- Scientific American

CLAUDE E. SHANNON, retired from his position as research mathematician at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, was Donner Professor of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1958 to 1978. WARREN WEAVER, now deceased, had a distinguished career in academic, government, and foundation work. RICHARD E. BLAHUT and BRUCE HAJEK are professors of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Claude Shannon's "A mathematical theory of communication" was first published in two parts in the July and October 1948 editions of the Bell System Technical Journal [1]. The paper has appeared in a number of republications since:

The original 1948 version was reproduced in the collection Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory [2]. The paper also appears in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers [3]. The text of the latter is a reproduction from the Bell Telephone System Technical Publications, a series of monographs by engineers and scientists of the Bell System published in the BSTJ and elsewhere. This version has correct section numbering (the BSTJ version has two sections numbered 21), and as far as we can tell, this is the only difference from the BSTJ version.
Prefaced by Warren Weaver's introduction, ``Recent contributions to the mathematical theory of communication,'' the paper was included in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1949 [4]. The text in this book differs from the original mainly in the following points:

the title is changed to ``The mathematical theory of communication'' and some sections have new headings,
Appendix 4 is rewritten,
the references to unpublished material have been updated to refer to the published material. ( )