Shannon was an American electronic engineer and mathematician. He is known as "the father of information theory" for having founded this field with one landmark paper published in 1948.

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Historically, information theory was developed to find fundamental limits on compressing and reliably communicating data.  A key measure of information in the theory is known as entropy, which is usually expressed by the average number of bits needed for storage or communication. Intuitively, entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved when encountering a random variable. For example, a fair coin flip (2 equally likely outcomes) will have less entropy than a roll of a die (6 equally likely outcomes).

He is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's student at MIT, he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master's thesis of all time.