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by eric1293 2241 days ago
To say Wiener and Shannon founded information theory is like saying Lorenz and Einstein founded speial relativity. I don't think physicists would consider Lorenz having made a major advance, and in fact even after the relativity was explained some people still didn't understand it.

Wiener made important contributions to mathematics but not to information theory. He wrote a book saying that entropy is related to "information" and is maximized for a Gaussian. That's about his involvement. The paper attached goes way beyond that.

1 comments

I didn't claim Wiener founded it, only that his popularization of the term is more ubiquitous than Shannon's formulation.