Information Theory - Information Theory Today

INFORMATION THEORY TODAY

As the foundation upon which modern telecommunications systems, technologies, and theories are built, information theory was of central importance to the Internet era; it was ultimately responsible for most of the revolutionary breakthroughs in digital communication and information storage. Compact discs and digital television, not to mention the Internet, are everyday items that owe their existence to information theory. Information theory holds that all channels of information transmission and storage can also be expressed and analyzed in terms of bits, thereby providing the link that allowed for perfecting physical methods of information transmission, including how to send highly encoded Internet signals over simple telephone wires.

In the Internet world, information theory proved tremendously important not only for the basics of Internet telecommunications but also for cryptography, another field in which Shannon worked. Cryptography, in the contemporary sense, refers to protecting electronic information from compromise by applying mathematical algorithms consisting of a series of bits that scrambles the information and later decodes it when necessary. Cryptography was a key component of the development of e-commerce, since it lay at the heart of privacy and transaction protection.

Shannon's theory proved one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century, as it gave scientists a new way to consider information and provided the basic framework within which all digital communications technology would take shape. In addition to its role as the bedrock of modern telecommunications, information theory also washed over fields as disparate as biology, ecology, medicine, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, and even investment theory.