On the Shannon Centennial

I found in my snail mail mailbox my paper copy of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter.  First, I was delighted by the news that Michelle Effros (of Cal Tech) is the new President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.   Michelle has a long history of service (as well as, it goes without saying, outstanding research) in the information theory community, and is a great selection for the job.

In her opening column, Michelle discusses the importance of letting people outside of their community know what the information theory research community is doing, especially with the Shannon Centennial (April 30, 2016 will be the 100th anniversary of his birth) coming up.  The IT Society will be spearheading outreach efforts as part of the Centennial.  As Michelle says,

Every school child learns the name of Albert Einstein;  his most famous equation has somehow entered the realm of popular culture.  Why is it that so few people know the name or have heard about the contributions of Claude Elwood Shannon?

In Computer Science, Turing is our "guiding light", and we had a very successful centenary celebration -- as well as a recent popular movie The Imitation Game -- to make Turing's life and work as well as the importance of computer science as a scientific discipline more well known and understood to the rest of the world.  But Shannon, too, is one of the guiding lights of computer science;  it is hard to imagine large parts of computer science theory and networking, for example, without the foundations laid out by Shannon in developing the theory of communications.

I have always thought that the Information Theory community and the computer science community -- particularly on the theory side -- should interact and communicate more, as there are huge overlaps in the problems being studied and still significant differences in techniques used (although there's more and more crossover in this regard).  Perhaps the Shannon Centennial will provide some grand opportunities for the two communities to come together, to promote the Shannon legacy, and as a side benefit to learn more from and about each other.