Claude Shannon

He studied communication and need a measure for the amount of information exchanged when 2 entities communicate. THe measure he came up with is called 'surprisal', also known as information content, shannon information. How much information is contained in a message is determined by how surpising the message is.
A mature zettelkasten will give you lots of ideas you put in a long time ago and have since forgotten surprising you in new ways.
In 1949 Shannon completed a paper (published in March 1950) which estimates the game-tree complexity of chess, which is approximately 10^120^. This number is now often referred to as the "Shannon number", and is still regarded today as an accurate estimate of the game's complexity.
worked with Vannevar Bush on differential analyzer machine
1940 worked on a thesis about switching circuits that became the basis of modern computers (and and or gates)
saw that the bit was the fundamental part of digital communication
it is always more efficient to change the data into bits before transmission
also interested in juggling and poetry