A Mathematical Theory of Communication


A Mathematical Theory of Communication is an article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. It was renamed The Mathematical Theory of Communication in the 1949 book of the same name, a small but significant title change after realizing the generality of this work.

Publication

The article was the founding work of the field of information theory. It was later published in 1949 as a book titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication, which was published as a paperback in 1963. The book contains an additional article by Warren Weaver, providing an overview of the theory for a more general audience.

Contents

Shannon's article laid out the basic elements of communication:
It also developed the concepts of information entropy and redundancy, and introduced the term bit as a unit of information. It was also in this paper that the Shannon–Fano coding technique was proposed – a technique developed in conjunction with Robert Fano.