The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communication. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented as either "1" or "0", but other representations such as true/false, yes/no, on/off, or +/− are also widely used.
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory" and as the "father of the Information Age". Shannon was the first to describe the Boolean gates that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and was one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was established and put on a firm footing by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, though early contributions were made in the 1920s through the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley. It is at the intersection of electronic engineering, mathematics, statistics, computer science, neurobiology, physics, and electrical engineering.
Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both the technical definition in terms of Von Neumann entropy and the general computational term.
Neil James Alexander Sloane FLSW is a British-American mathematician. His major contributions are in the fields of combinatorics, error-correcting codes, and sphere packing. Sloane is best known for being the creator and maintainer of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS).
John Wilder Tukey was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma all bear his name. He is also credited with coining the term bit and the first published use of the word software.
Robert Gray Gallager is an American electrical engineer known for his work on information theory and communications networks.
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory.
David S. Slepian was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work with algebraic coding theory, probability theory, and distributed source coding. He was colleagues with Claude Shannon and Richard Hamming at Bell Labs.
Peter Elias was a pioneer in the field of information theory. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty from 1953 to 1991. In 1955, Elias introduced convolutional codes as an alternative to block codes. He also established the binary erasure channel and proposed list decoding of error-correcting codes as an alternative to unique decoding.
Jacob Ziv was an Israeli electrical engineer and information theorist who developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms alongside Abraham Lempel.
George David Forney Jr. is an American electrical engineer who made contributions in telecommunication system theory, specifically in coding theory and information theory.
The Claude E. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society was created to honor consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. It is a prestigious prize in information theory, covering technical contributions at the intersection of mathematics, communication engineering, and theoretical computer science.
Sergio Verdú is a former professor of electrical engineering and specialist in information theory. Until September 22, 2018, he was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he taught and conducted research on information theory in the Information Sciences and Systems Group. He was also affiliated with the program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He was dismissed from the faculty following a university investigation of alleged sexual misconduct.
Jack Keil Wolf was an American researcher in information theory and coding theory.
Toby Berger was an American information theorist.
Robert M. Gray is an American information theorist, and the Alcatel-Lucent Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He is best known for his contributions to quantization and compression, particularly the development of vector quantization.
Professor Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) (Hebrew: שלמה שמאי (שיץ) ) is a distinguished professor at the Department of Electrical engineering at the Technion − Israel Institute of Technology. Professor Shamai is an information theorist and winner of the 2011 Shannon Award.
Alexander Semenovich Holevo is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, one of the pioneers of quantum information science.
Mark A. Levinson is an American film director. He directed the 2013 documentary Particle Fever and the 2019 documentary The Bit Player.
