The Juggler

Claude Shannon was singularly brilliant.

He’s often credited as one of the founders of artificial intelligence, thanks to his description of how electronic circuits could work together to solve complex problems quickly.

He’s also called the founder of information theory, which may prove to be fundamental to the way the universe works.

Like Alan Turing, he was heavily involved with cryptography during World War II, contributing to the national defense of the US and to the Allied cause. His paper on cryptography is considered foundational.

He built a machine that used artificial intelligence to learn by trial and error—the first ever such device, in fact.

Some people knew Shannon through all of this great work in engineering, information theory, and mathematics. Many more knew him from his passion: juggling.

I might have neglected to mention that he sometimes juggled while riding his unicycle around the campus where he taught.

Why juggling, though? Why would someone so good at so many productive endeavors want to practice juggling?

I’ll take a gander at this. Shannon saw that juggling was two things, and both of those things appealed to him. First, juggling was really, really hard! This would be a serious challenge for both mind and body for just about anyone. This desire to solve tricky problems is reflected throughout Shannon’s most meaningful contributions.

Second, there was no such thing as “mastery” of juggling. Instead, it was a process that could be made more and more challenging for the person doing it, and beyond that, the system seemed very chaotic. Shannon liked the challenge of making order out of the chaos, just like the other things he worked on.

Like Richard Feynman, Claude Shannon didn’t care whether something was immediately useful or not. What mattered to him was satisfying his curiosity. Arthur Lewbel, the founder of the MIT juggling club where Shannon practiced, had this to say:

I think what he liked about juggling was that it was a peculiar physical motion.

In essence, he was interested because it was a challenge, and because he was so passionate, Shannon stuck with juggling. He even wrote an extensive and influential scientific paper on the subject, the first rigorous mathematical treatment of juggling.

Finding patterns and making sense of things that seemed chaotic were skills that led Shannon to create the modern world.

Claude Shannon, painted portrait - la théorie de l'information - thierry Ehrmann

I’m also confident that Shannon’s willingness to play and have fun with things he was curious about is exactly what drove him to have unique insights into other things.

Many of those other things have created the world we live in today, and without Shannon, it’s tough to say whether we would have an internet or smartphones.

Even beyond this, information theory—Shannon’s magnum opus—may well describe a fundamental feature of the universe and how it works. A scientist who knew Shannon from his Bell Labs days (because of course Shannon worked there) suggested that in a thousand years, people would have long forgotten the transistor, but they’d still be talking about information theory.

We’ll have to talk about that aspect of Claude Shannon another day!