NP obit

[Doug Millison]

Claude Shannon, Mathematician, Dies at 84

                     By GEORGE JOHNSON

Dr. Claude Elwood Shannon, the American mathematician and computer
scientist whose theories laid the groundwork for the electronic
communications networks that now lace the earth, died on Saturday in
Medford, Mass., after a long fight with Alzheimer's disease. He was 84.

Understanding, before almost anyone, the power that springs from encoding
information in a simple language of 1's and 0's, Dr. Shannon as a young man
wrote two papers that remain monuments in the fields of computer science
and information theory.

continues at

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/nyregion/27SHAN.html