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The Editio Princeps of Digital Circuit Analysis. The earliest printing of Claude E. Shannon s master s thesis, the AIEE "Advance Copy" preprint of June 1938, preceding both the MIT departmental "Reprint" of September 1938 and the Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers issue later that year. This preprint was distributed to delegates at the AIEE Summer Convention in Washington, D.C., and marks the first time Shannon s revolutionary ideas on the algebra of logic and electrical circuitry were put into print. It is the paper that made possible digital circuit design, computer logic, and the entire discipline of information theory. The handful of preprints produced for that meeting represented the debut of the most consequential scientific idea of the twentieth century the realization that every logical process could be represented by, and executed through, an electrical network. Provenance: Inscribed "Catherine Kay, 4819 Wallbank, Downers Grove, Ill.,". Catherine Wolf Shannon Kay was Claude Shannon s elder and only sibling, and the person to whom he remained closest throughout his life. She studied mathematics and literature at the University of Michigan, the same institution her younger brother would later attend, and their correspondence reveals a continuing exchange of ideas and encouragement. Their father, Claude Sr., was a judge and amateur tinkerer, their mother Mabel a language teacher; both children inherited a mixture of verbal and mechanical talent. Catherine married the radio engineer Riley A. Kay in 1936, and the couple lived at 4819 Wallbank Avenue in Downers Grove, Illinois the address written in her hand on this cover. Riley Kay was an early radio amateur and technical writer; his home workshop and involvement with electrical devices formed an atmosphere in which Claude s new ideas about circuits were naturally discussed. Although there is no evidence that Catherine took part in her brother s research, she was scientifically literate and followed his career with pride. Shannon sent her copies of his earliest papers and later, during the war years at Bell Labs, wrote to her about cryptography and relay systems in code. That she preserved this preprint the very first appearance of his work attests both to familial affection and to her awareness of its significance. Claude Elwood Shannon (1916 2001) has been called "the man who invented the Information Age." His 1937 MIT master s thesis, abstracted in this AIEE preprint, united Boolean algebra with the engineering of switching circuits, showing that the binary logic of true and false could be physically realized with open and closed electrical relays. What had been a theoretical branch of nineteenth-century mathematics became, through his insight, a practical design language for machinery. Shannon demonstrated that every logical proposition could be expressed as a network of switches, and conversely that any network of switches could be reduced to an algebraic equation whose solution described its behaviour. The calculus of relays he devised allowed complex systems telephone exchanges, control circuits, and ultimately computers to be planned with the precision of algebra. As Vannevar Bush wrote soon after, "the genius of this young man is that he has translated thought into machinery." Historians now regard A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits as the founding document of digital logic, as Copernicus s De revolutionibus was of astronomy: the point at which an ancient craft became a modern science. In the months following the thesis, Shannon s professors arranged for its presentation to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. The AIEE printed a short run of "Advance Copies," dated May 27 1938 and distributed for the Summer Convention held June 20 24 in Washington, D.C. Each carried the legend "Manuscript submitted March 1, 1938; made available for preprinting May 27, 1938; scheduled for presentation at the AIEE Summer Conven.
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