ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Claude Elwood Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon was a really smart man who lived a long time ago. He was born in 1916 and grew up in Michigan. He loved learning about numbers and computers and figuring out how things worked.

When he grew up, he went to college and studied math and engineering. He became famous for writing a really important paper about how to transmit messages without making any mistakes. This paper was so important that people still use his ideas today for things like sending text messages and emails.

Shannon also came up with an important idea called information entropy. This is a fancy way of saying that some messages are more complicated than others, and it takes more work to understand them. He figured out how to measure this complexity and how it can be used to help computers work better.

Overall, Claude Elwood Shannon was a really important person in computer science and he helped create a lot of the technology we use today.