Had he but put his period nine words before the end he could have been the prescient prophet of the women’s equality movement.” Later in the paper, Shannon makes the case for female jugglers more explicit. Nyquist and Hartley were the first trying to capture the information content in a message. This shows a bit because Shannon's work after his breakthrough in 1948-49 is only superfluously covered. In 1983, as he had so often before, Shannon brought the work from the world of theory into the realm of mechanics: he set out to build his own juggling robot.It all started when Betty brought home a little four-inch clown, doing a five ball shower, from the cake decorating store ($1.98). No one, that is, until Claude Shannon.
He was an (electrical) engineer (his master degree) much more than he was a mathematician (his PhD).
A few years later, Al-Quhi became a kind of court mathematician for the local emir, who, fascinated by planetary motion, built an observatory in the garden of his palace and put Al-Quhi in charge.
For example, one day Doc Edgerton, inventor of the strobe light, stopped by the juggling club and asked if he could photograph some of us juggling under strobe lights.” What was unusual was a return visit. “As a physical experiment, it was a complete failure,” remembered Lewbel. Do I sound pretentious?”For Shannon, it was important that people reading this paper “try not to forget the poetry, the comedy and the music of juggling for the Carabellas and Margaritas future and present.” We can sense something of Shannon’s self-consciousness in the next sentence, when he interrupts this train of thought and cribs Sleet to ask the reader, “Does this sound pretentious?”If it did, Shannon knew it.
Mustering as much antagonism as we might imagine Shannon capable of, he dismisses Socrates’s blinkered view of a woman’s capacities.
The IJA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, with the mission to render assistance to fellow jugglers. He not only pioneered binary logic and arithmetic, he invented a whole new subject area - information theory and still had time to have fun with computer chess and Theseus, the amazing maze running relay mouse - see the video! But from Claude Shannon, it was par for the course.
Format: Hardcover. For all his mathematical and mechanical gifts, “it was something he simply could not master, making it all the more tantalizing,” wrote Jon Gertner. It was in the early 1970s that these peculiarities finally tugged enough to provoke him to write a mathematical paper on the topic.Juggling, observed Lewbel, “is complex enough to have interesting properties and simple enough to allow the modeling of these properties.” But for all of its mathematical richness, when Shannon first began his work on the topic, he was starting from scratch: the field had no body of written work.The first important scientific work on the topic was in the field of psychology. Both the inquiry and the method were vintage Shannon: whimsical, indifferent to practicalities, and originating in an activity that typical professors might have dubbed unserious, but which Shannon, a tenured member of the MIT faculty, found amusing enough to merit scholarly time and attention.That’s how Arthur Lewbel, an MIT student, found himself suspended by his feet in the middle of Shannon’s living room. The insight Swift was after wasn’t “How does a juggler learn his craft?” so much as “How can a human being learn any craft?” Following in his footsteps, psychologists continued to use juggling as a research tool into the mid-twentieth century.