In the outro from February 4's "Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal" I mentioned:
Finally, Shannon's second wife, Betty, was Claude's collaborator and went deep into some very fancy math and science, right there with him. I should probably do a post on her.
I was thinking of this piece from Scientific American, July 24, 2017:
Her husband, Claude, helped create the computer revolution, but few knew that she was his closest collaborator
His name has faded in our era, but in mid-20th century America, Claude Elwood Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories was a bona fide scientific star. In 1954, for example, Fortune featured Shannon in a list of the nation’s 20 most important scientists, alongside future Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson, among others. Shannon also made the pages of Time and Life magazines, appeared on national television, and even earned a spread in Vogue, complete with a photo shoot by the renowned Henri Cartier-Bresson.
There was ample reason for the acclaim. Shannon’s landmark 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” launched the field of information theory, and his stunning MIT master’s thesis proved that binary circuits could perform logic. Together, the two papers formed the basis for the digital age. And he wasn’t just a theorist: Theseus, an “artificially intelligent” mouse Shannon built, garnered national attention as an early example of a thinking machine.
Even within the star-studded Bell Laboratories, one of the most prestigious labs in the country, Shannon stood out. And with his thin frame and dark hair, he seemed tailor-made for the limelight, in a post-war era in which the figure of “The Scientist” had captured the public imagination. Yet at the height of this brief celebrity, Shannon stepped away. He left Bell Labs, secured a professorship at MIT, and spent his remaining decades living a mostly private life.
His colleagues were surprised, but friends understood. Shannon was an introvert with little appetite for publicity. Within the famously open-door culture of Bell Labs, Shannon’s door was one of the few that remained closed. A relatively small proportion of his published papers included co-authors. Even his hobbies—flying airplanes, playing jazz clarinet, reading poetry, tinkering in his workshop—were solitary pursuits.
His solitude was central to a career in which he chased his own instincts, often at the expense of more prestigious or lucrative options. Being alone also helped to lighten the social burden of brilliance. As one former Bell Labs colleague put it, “[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.
There was one collaborator, however, who has been written out of Shannon’s story. She was an unsung force behind his life and work, and she is one of the few who could not only keep up with Shannon but also stretch his horizons.
Her name was Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Moore, and Shannon first met her in 1948 at Bell Labs. Betty worked as one of the Labs’ “computers”—the women who did the mathematical calculations needed by the engineers. Betty had come to the Labs after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the New Jersey College for Women (now part of Rutgers University), which she attended on full scholarship. A gifted mathematical mind, she started work in Bell Labs’ mathematics department, focusing on microwave research, and then moved to the fast-growing radar group. In addition to her day-to-day work, she also published research, including a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum on "Composing Music by a Stochastic Process."....
....MUCH MORE
