Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Digital Circuits and Boolean Algebra


For people focusing on VLSI, digital logic and boolean algebra is not much too different. While Boolean algebra is a branch of mathematics and is named after its inventor "George Boole", its more realistic application, by utilizing electronic circuit elements like relays etc. was proposed by Claude Shannon, in his exceptional unpublished Masters Thesis (submitted 1937 at the age of 21) and published in 1940 at MIT. How many of us do really look forward to such a challenging work in a MS today? It was just so impressive that I could not resist writing about it and honoring such a great inventor/scientist. Looking back the inventor of digital logic in circuits did it when he was 21, at a point in his career when his creativity was all that he had. Thank you for such a wonderful contribution.


Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), is also known as the "Father of Information Theory". Amongst his famous contributions are the following:

Signing Off,
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2 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this.. Highly motivating and proves that atleast some people can make a significant contribution during the course of graduate study.

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  2. This is really interesting. Thanks for the post ashish. Just to add to it shannon's information theory paper published in 1948 was the most cited paper so far. I have read that some where in IEEE archives.

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