TheCodeBreakers
I wouldn't say one came before the other—they were so close together
you couldn't separate them." Though the work on both was substantially
t complete by about 1944, he continued polishing them until heir
publication as separate papers in the abstruse Bell System Technical
Journal in 1948 and 1949.
Both articles—"A Mathematical Theory of Communica-|tion" and
"Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems"— present their ideas in
densely mathematical form, pocked vith phrases like "this inverse must
exist uniquely" and
expressions like "T^RjCTkR,)-1"^!^." But Shannon's terse and incisive
style breathes life into them. The first paper gave birth to information
theory; the second dealt with cryptology in information-theory terms.
Chief among their new concepts is that of redundancy. Redundancy
retains, in information theory, the essence of its lay meaning of needless
excess, but it is refined and extended. Roughly, redundancy means that