Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Eight years on one paper
Years at the desk
Napkins decorated the table. Strands of thought and stray sections of equations piled up around him, and he wrote a neat script on lined paper with the raw materials everywhere. There were breaks for music and cigarettes and bleary-eyed walks to work in the morning, and then back to the desk, alone, at night.
Ideas on their own time
The work was not linear. Ideas came when they came, and he had no control over it. One night he woke up in the middle of the night with an idea and stayed up working on it until morning.
Fame and withdrawal
When the paper came out, he knew it was good, and he trusted his own judgment so much that he never argued his ideas with anyone. Fame followed. Bell Labs and MIT offered him nearly anything he wanted, and people compared him to Einstein: Shannon is to communications what Einstein is to physics. He did not use his standing to widen his network. He closed himself off further, ignoring letters, colleagues, and projects, and spent his attention on the puzzles that interested him most.
Why do ideas arrive after sleep?
In a 2004 study in Nature, Ullrich Wagner and colleagues gave people a number task with a hidden shortcut. After a night of sleep, about 59 percent found the shortcut, compared with about 23 percent of those who stayed awake for the same stretch. Sleep appears to replay and reorganize recent memories, which can bring out relationships that were not obvious before.
How did his paper spread so fast?
In 1949 the University of Illinois Press published the paper as a book, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, with an introductory essay by Warren Weaver. Weaver's plain-language essay carried the ideas to linguists, psychologists, and biologists. By 1956 Shannon had grown wary of the hype and wrote an editorial called 'The Bandwagon' in the journal IRE Transactions on Information Theory. In it he said information theory had been oversold outside communication engineering.
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