1948
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
He proved that information could be measured. Uncertainty, finally, had a unit.
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Every message you have ever sent.
2017
Attention Is All You Need
A machine could read an entire sentence at once — every token attending to every other, simultaneously.
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The software you use every day.
1936
On Computable Numbers
A thought experiment about what it means to compute — before any computer existed.
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Every computer that has ever existed.
2008
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Trust without a trusted party. An entire financial system in nine pages — then he disappeared.
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Nobody knows who he is.
The world is built on papers most people never read.
“We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton, 1675. The papers in this archive are those shoulders.
Shannon wrote 77 pages in 1948. Here is what happened next.
1
Paper
A Mathematical Theory of Communication · Claude E. Shannon · Bell Labs · 1948
H = −Σ p(x) log p(x)
2
Idea
Information as measurable uncertainty. A bit is a binary choice. Entropy is the average surprise in a message.
3
Research
Channel capacity · Error-correcting codes · Coding theory · Data compression · Cryptography
4
Technology
Digital communication · JPEG & MP3 compression · Hard drive error correction · Wi-Fi protocols
5
Industry
Telecommunications · Internet infrastructure · Data center storage · Every streaming platform
6
Your life
Every message you have ever sent. Every photo. Every song. Every call.
Ideas pass between generations as chains of insight.
computationinformationintelligencemathematicsnetworks
What keeps us reading.
shannon was 32 when he wrote this
the turing paper reads like a story. i didn’t expect to feel something.
just realized bitcoin was described completely in 8 pages in 2008 and it’s been 16 years of people arguing about it
why did nobody show me these in school
the crispr paper is from 2012. my aunt’s cancer treatment uses crispr.
Read them with us.
A room in Tashkent where smart people read papers, not summaries.