Sixty years ago, the breakthrough work of an American genius changed the rules of the communication game. The change led to billion-dollar companies like Google and Microsoft; to radically new designs for new engines, seen in applications as diverse as Facebook and Star Wars, cell phones, mp3 files, Second Life, video games and the Internet itself.

The story begins in 1948, with the publication of a landmark engineering paper called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” This paper changed – and continues to change – everything, and not just in engineering. It was written by a Michigan-born Bell Labs researcher named Claude Shannon, whose name remains curiously unfamiliar even to his countrymen. 

“Albert Einstein’s theory was revolutionary because it overthrew Newton’s theory of gravity,” writes USC Viterbi electrical engineer Bart Kosko in his recent book, Noise. “Shannon’s theory was revolutionary because there was no real prior theory for it to overthrow…. Shannon came up with new mathematical tools. Then he used these tools to answer questions no one before had ever asked. Shannon achieved something as primal as Newton had.”

USC Distinguished and University Professor Solomon Golomb is the winner of an award named after Shannon; and much of the star USC mathematician/electrical engineer’s career has been spent exploring the consequences of Shannon’s paper. “It is no exaggeration,” Golomb wrote in a  2001 obituary tribute in Science, “that Claude Shannon was the father of the Information Age and his intellectual achievement was one of the greatest of the 20th century.”

What was this achievement? Shannon radically redefined information by separating it from meaning. He defined information in terms of its opposite: noise.

People can disagree about truth, evidence, significance and almost anything else. What is not negotiable is accuracy of data transmission.

Shannon concentrated on the problem of transmitting messages: “The fundamental problem of communication,” he wrote in that seminal 1948 paper, “is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” Any message, Shannon showed, could be encoded into individual bits of information – yeses and no’s – and transmitted with high efficiency across any environment, however noisy, in a state as close to perfection as desired.

Previously, electronic communication had depended on making a kind of mold of a sound or an image – an electronic replica, if you will. It was this analog that would be transmitted. The problem was, any kind of interference on the line would garble the pattern and erode the accuracy of the double.

But, Shannon proved, if you could instead encode  – or digitize – the message into a pattern of yeses and no’s, that pattern could be goof-proofed. With clever enough coding, the chance of error could be brought as close to zero as desired. Despite noise, the message could always get through, not just understandably but perfectly, with near-perfect efficiency.

USC engineers took an early lead implementing Shannon’s work. In 1962, then-dean Zohrab Kaprielian laid the groundwork for a unique research center, the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute. SIPI was dedicated to finding ways to use Shannon’s insights efficiently to encode images. Co-founder Irving Reed, another recipient of the Shannon Prize and, at age 85, a living legend in engineering circles, devised an efficient code to detect errors in information transmission – codes now used in applications ranging from fax machines to CDs.

“It was an enormous pleasure to inform a surprised Bill Gates in a face-to-face meeting that I was the person behind the Reed-Solomon error-correcting code,” wrote Reed in his memoir. “But the code in no way could have been possible without the groundwork of communication theory laid by Claude Shannon.”

Golomb and Reed, now an emeritus professor, are not the only Shannon Prize winners with a USC background. A third is Lloyd Welch, co-inventor of the Baum-Welch algorithm and an emeritus professor who joined USC’s faculty in 1965. Andrew Viterbi Ph.D. ’62  makes four. The founder of Qualcomm and namesake of USC’s engineering school devised a Shannon-inspired information algorithm at the base of cell phones and other communications.

But engineering is only a part of the story: The influence of Shannon’s digital data insight now extends out in all directions, far beyond communications engineering – far beyond engineering itself.

Film is a classic example of the way Shannon-inspired tools have rewritten the rules of the game.

For almost the entirety of human history, recorded information was limited to words or other marks on paper. Celluloid was different, but it shared with books the capacity for mass distribution. For the first time, exact recorded copies of content moved off the page. Prints of films were as equal to each other in information as copies of books. And in addition to words, this new information medium incorporated sounds and moving images. 

Other new media – television and radio – joined the mix. Located at the epicenter of the emerging entertainment industry, USC opened a school to teach and study these new arts, one that quickly rose to preeminence.

The Shannon-inspired sea change that altered everything, and brought cinema into USC’s information triangle was, of course, computers and digitization. Multimedia material could be and was transformed into digital representations, transmittable with Shannon purity, preservable with Shannon fidelity.

But digitization was only the beginning. In addition to processing, editing, transforming and transmitting existing forms of multimedia artistic expression, computers allowed brand new ones to appear.

 “We know the past but cannot control it,” begins Shannon’s paradox of information. That past has seen a whole series of paths to a new paradigm of learning converge at USC. “We control the future but cannot know it,” Shannon continued.

Maybe not, but it looks like that future may just bring a 21st-century Claude Shannon to study at USC.

– Eric Mankin