"Or electrical engineer [[Claude Shannon]], who **launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan**. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician [[George Boole]], who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed that logic problems could be solved like math equations. **It resulted in absolutely nothing of practical importance until seventy years after Boole passed away, when Shannon did a summer internship at AT&T’s Bell Labs research facility. There he recognized that he could combine telephone call-routing technology with Boole’s logic system to encode and transmit any type of information electronically**. It was the fundamental insight on which computers rely." --- **Tags** — [[quotes]], [[specialisation]], [[innovation]], [[teaching-anecdotes]], [[outsight]] , [[polymath]] **Source** — [[202308101402 — B — Range]]