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Too brilliant to fly
The student was Claude Shannon, a young man at MIT who would go on to found information theory. He had taken an interest in learning to fly, and everyone around him could already see how unusual his mind was. His instructor decided the risk was unacceptable.
The instructor put it in a letter to the president: Shannon was not only unusual but a near genius of most unusual promise, and with permission, the instructor would keep him out of the plane. A crash was not a risk worth taking with a life like that.
The president wrote back a few days later, in a level-headed reply. He doubted it was wise to urge a young man to stop flying, or to take the opportunity away from him on the ground of his being intellectually superior. He doubted it would be good for the development of the young man's character and personality. Shannon was allowed to keep flying.
How did Shannon get from MIT to Bell Labs?
Shannon finished his master's thesis at MIT in 1937 and his doctorate there in 1940. He spent the 1940 to 1941 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1941 he joined Bell Labs, where he worked on fire control and cryptography during the war. He stayed until 1956, when he returned to MIT as a professor.
How did his master's thesis change circuits?
The thesis, titled 'A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,' showed that the true-or-false algebra of George Boole could describe networks of switches. Switches wired in series behave like logical AND, and switches wired in parallel behave like logical OR. Engineers could then design and simplify circuits on paper instead of by trial and error. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers awarded him its Alfred Noble Prize for the work in 1940.
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