__Transmission__ by Hari Kunzru. "Pinned to the corkboard by her desk she has Mehta’s picture next to that of Claude Shannon" (267)

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 - February 24, 2001) is known as the father of information theory. As a researcher at MIT, he developed rigorous and formal links between binary arithmetic and digital logic/circuit design enabling the development of modern processors and digital information. He put this theory into practice while working at Bell Labs during World War II where he modeled data in terms of signals to be processed. For example, the representation of letters as bits and words as collections of bits. This analogy paved the way for many fields such as cryptography and digital compression.

Scientific American – “Claude E. Shannon: Father of Information Theory”

Bell Labs page on Shannon’s Information Theory