SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001)

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ID 1105712
Los 59 | SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001)
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£ 50 000 – 80 000
SHANNON, Claude Elwood (1916-2001)

'A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits.' Offprint from: Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938). New York: American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1938.

Extremely rare offprint of this landmark paper in the development of the electronic digital computer; ‘possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century’ (Gardner). Shannon obtained B.S. degrees in mathematics and engineering in 1936 from the University of Michigan, and later that year accepted the post of research assistant at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering, where he began working toward an advanced degree. While working with the Bush differential analyzer at MIT, Shannon became interested in the theory and design of complicated relay and switching circuits like the ones used in telephone systems. As an undergraduate he had studied symbolic logic and Boolean algebra. Shannon submitted this thesis in 1937 at the age of 21, only one year after Turing published ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.’ In his thesis Shannon recognized that the true/false values in Boole's two-valued logic were analogous to the open and closed states of electrical circuits. From this it followed that Boolean algebra could be used to describe or to design electrical circuits:



‘It is possible to perform complex mathematical operations by means of relay circuits. Numbers may be represented by the positions of relays or stepping switches, and interconnections between sets of relays can be made to represent various mathematical operations. In fact, any operation that can be completely described in a finite number of steps using the words 'if,' 'or,' 'and,' etc. ... can be done automatically with relays’ (p.10).



Because Boolean algebra, invented by George Boole in his books, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and The Laws of Thought (1854), makes it possible to devise a procedure or build a device, the state of which can store specific information, once Shannon showed that electrical circuitry can perform logical and mathematical operations, and can also store the result of these operations, the inference could be drawn that it was possible to design calculating machines using electrical switches.



According to the statement to lower left on the first page, Shannon submitted the manuscript on 1 March 1938, and preprints of this paper were available from 27 May 1938. This ‘preprint’ has reset pagination of 1-11 (in the journal vol. it would be paginated 713-723); the final page bears a colophon stating it is a preprint and gives a date of 16 September 1938 for the printing of the whole volume. No copy of the offprint can be traced at auction, and RBH only records 3 copies of the journal issue appearing at auction. From Gutenberg to the Internet 12.1; Origins of Cyberspace 363.



Quarto (280 x 215mm). 11pp., 287-292. Stapled self-wrappers (staples rusting, faint insignificant creasing at top corner and vertical creasefold, otherwise a fresh, clean copy). Provenance: publisher’s offprint stamp to top left-hand corner of first page just overlapping title and author name.

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