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SHANNON S FAMOUS MASTER S THESIS - INCREDIBLY RARE OFFPRINT. First edition, incredibly rare separately-paginated offprint, one of four known copies, of Shannon s famous MIT Master s Thesis, which Herman Goldstein has called "masterful … surely one of the most important master s theses ever written … a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science" (The Computer From Pascal to Von Neumann, pp. 119-120). While working on his thesis, Shannon was invited to present his work at the Summer Conference of the AIEE, June 2-24, 1938. His presentation was published in December 1938 in the AIEE Transactions; the present offprint of that article is dated 16 September 1938. "Claude Shannon, in his master s thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, submitted to MIT on August 10, 1937, showed that the two-valued algebra developed by George Boole could be used as a basis for the design of electrical circuits … This thesis became the theoretical basis for the electronics and computer industries that were developed after World War II" (). "In 1936 [Shannon] accepted the position of research assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The position allowed him to continue studying toward advanced degrees while working part-time for the department. The work in question was ideally suited to his interests and talents. It involved the operation of the Bush differential analyzer, the most advanced calculating machine of that era … Also of interest was a complex relay circuit associated with the differential analyzer that controlled its operation and involved over one hundred relays. In studying and servicing this circuit, Shannon became interested in the theory and design of relay and switching circuits. He had studied symbolic logic and Boolean algebra at Michigan in mathematics courses, and realized that this was the appropriate mathematics for studying such two-valued systems. He developed these ideas during the summer of 1937, which he spent at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City, and, back at MIT, in his master s thesis, where he showed how Boolean algebra could be used in the analysis and synthesis of switching and computer circuits. The thesis, his first published paper, aroused considerable interest when it appeared in 1938 in the AIEE Transactions. In 1940 it was awarded the Alfred Noble Prize of the combined engineering societies of the United States" (Collected Papers, pp. xi-xii). "In his paper, Shannon proved that Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic could be used to simplify the arrangement of the electromechanical relays then used in telephone routing switches, then turned the concept upside down and also proved that it should be possible to use arrangements of relays to solve Boolean algebra problems. Exploiting this property of electrical switches to do logic is the basic concept that underlies all electronic digital computers. Shannon's work became the foundation of practical digital circuit design when it became widely known among the electrical engineering community during and after WW2. The theoretical rigor of Shannon s work completely replaced the ad hoc methods that had previously prevailed" (history-/ModernComputer/thinkers/). This copy of the offprint is from Shannon s personal files we are not aware of any copy originating from any other source. Not on OCLC, no copies in auction records. Provenance: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). "Shannon (1916-2001), who died in February after a long illness, was one of the greatest of the giants who created the information age. John von Neumann, Alan Turing and many other visionaries gave us computers that could process information. But it was Claude Shannon who gave us the modern concept of information an intellectual leap that earns him a place on whatever high-tech equivalent of Mount Rushmore is one day established … "And that s.
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