10
Digital imaging
10.1 The history of digits
It is widely thought that one Claude Elwood Shannon, who died at the age of 84 in 2001, single-handedly laid the foundation for what became known as information theory, that branch of mathematics concerning the transmission of data in a digital form.
In what has been called the most important Masters Thesis of the twentieth century, A Symbolic Analysis Of Relay And Switching Circuits and published in 1938, he first put forward the notion that it was possible to solve problems simply by manipulating two symbols – one and zero – in an automated electrical circuit.
Later in his work A Mathematical Theory of Communication he first coined the term ‘bit’ as the fundamental unit of information which encapsulates ...
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