![]() I dusted off my 1986 copy of Robert Cole’s “Computer Communications”, my notes still there in the margins of page 10, where I left them. Life, however, with a patient smirk, ensured that the ashes of the MTC rose like a phoenix 20 years later, when I was faced with presenting the mathematical good news to contemporary LIS students taking our Library and Information Science Foundation module as part of their masters. It did not seem so relevant to my work at the time, which was with information resources in toxicology. I believed that I would forget Shannon’s theory entirely, as soon as the exam was over. ![]() Information is the new black, and everyone is wearing it. I feel my time has come all those hours spent memorizing equations to show that I truly, deeply understood how many signals you can push down a channel of a certain size, allowing for noise, have finally been rewarded, and I can now brandish my information-science credentials with a superior air of I told you so. This is certainly good news for our information science course, where information has been considered from an academic perspective since 1961. ![]() ![]() It must be the popularising effect of James Gleick’s new book “The Information”, because suddenly everyone I meet wants to talk about information: its history, its epistemology and Shannon-Weaver’s 1948 mathematical theory of communication (MTC), which became known as the mathematical theory of information.
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