History of information theory

The study of information theory began with the publication of Claude E. Shannon's classic paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell System Technical Journal in July and October 1948, although Shannon had substantially completed the paper at Bell Labs by the end of 1944, Shannon introduced the qualitative and quantitative model of communication as a statistical process, opening with the assertion that "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point." With it came the ideas of the information entropy and redundancy of a source, and its relevance through the source coding theorem; the mutual information, and the channel capacity of a noisy channel, including the promise of perfect loss-free communication given by the noisy-channel coding theorem; the practical result of the Shannon–Hartley law for the channel capacity of a Gaussian channel; and of course the bit - a new way of seeing the most fundamental unit of information. == Before 1948 == === Early telecommunications === Some of the oldest methods of telecommunications implicitly used some of the ideas that were later formalized by Shannon in the development of information theory.

Source: Wikipedia — History of information theory (CC BY-SA 4.0)