We rave about giants like Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Tesla, and Edison. But in terms of direct impact on our lives in the information age, nobody comes close to Claude Shannon.
In 1948, he dropped a straight 10/10 paper:
A Mathematical Theory of Communication.
His work has imbued us with the ability to send whispers across continents.
The paper doesn’t just suggest techniques, it draws the boundaries of reality for information... how far compression can go (entropy), the maximum rate a noisy channel can carry reliably (capacity), and why error correction isn’t optional if you want those whispers to arrive intact.