Monday, June 8, 2009
Long Overdue Praise
I finally got around to reading Claude Shannon's Master's thesis.
Wow.
His thesis showed a correspondence between Boolean logic and electronic circuitry. By itself this is a profound achievement, but Shannon's thesis went further. He "programmed" electronic circuitry using Boolean logic, simplified his designs using De Morgan's laws, and from there drew circuit diagrams.
Which is to say he noticed Boole's logic was a valid "programming language" for circuits and demonstrated this to be an accurate observation. He wrote code using this programming language. He then ran it through an optimizer, resulting in optimized electronic circuits for several applications: binary adding, prime numbers, vote counting.
It's astonishing work. Reading it left me feeling humbled- it's not even Shannon's most notable work, and only he was twenty-one when he wrote it. For mathematical beauty, Gödel and Turing may have him beat, but in terms of both approachability and importance, Shannon is right at the front of the pack. His work arguably even edges out Konrad Zuse's Plankalkül as the first "high level programming langauge," though it notably lacked an implementation of a universal computing machine to run on.
Not that that slowed him down much.
Wow.
His thesis showed a correspondence between Boolean logic and electronic circuitry. By itself this is a profound achievement, but Shannon's thesis went further. He "programmed" electronic circuitry using Boolean logic, simplified his designs using De Morgan's laws, and from there drew circuit diagrams.
Which is to say he noticed Boole's logic was a valid "programming language" for circuits and demonstrated this to be an accurate observation. He wrote code using this programming language. He then ran it through an optimizer, resulting in optimized electronic circuits for several applications: binary adding, prime numbers, vote counting.
It's astonishing work. Reading it left me feeling humbled- it's not even Shannon's most notable work, and only he was twenty-one when he wrote it. For mathematical beauty, Gödel and Turing may have him beat, but in terms of both approachability and importance, Shannon is right at the front of the pack. His work arguably even edges out Konrad Zuse's Plankalkül as the first "high level programming langauge," though it notably lacked an implementation of a universal computing machine to run on.
Not that that slowed him down much.
// posted by David @ 11:16 PM 
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