Claude Shannon
1916–2001 — founder of information theory
American mathematician and engineer; entropy, channel capacity, and the data processing inequality underpin the uncertainty and atomicity facets.
Claude Shannon (1916–2001) founded information theory in the 1940s — a mathematical account of uncertainty, communication, and what processing can and cannot preserve. Genesis Part III uses his results as the formal backing for epistemic uncertainty and the L0–L3 atomicity ladder: processing cannot increase mutual information with ground truth (data processing inequality); each step has bounded channel capacity.
What we cite
- Shannon entropy — uncertainty in an outcome; zero for deterministic steps, positive for probabilistic model output.
- Data processing inequality — formal proof that depth in a chain can only preserve or lose information about the source.
- Channel capacity — maximum information transmissible through a processing step; informal analogue of U-low / U-med / U-high bands.
Corpus stance
Adopt — not as metaphysics of truth, but as formal limits on trust composition: the facets track real properties of information processing Shannon made precise. See What Information Theory Says.