Chen-Pang Yeang, "Information, Cryptography, and Noise"
This talk, which draws on the attached chapter, focuses on the roles of noise in Claude Shannon's development of information theory in the 1940s. It explains how Shannon formed his core concepts of generic noise through his wartime cryptographic work, how such concepts of noise configured his so-called "channel Coding Theorem," and how he came up with various visual representations of noise as modeling of uncertainty at large. While the content of this presentation is not about linguistics in its narrow sense, Shannon's information theory did have profound influences on the studies of languages in the mid-20th century. His talk about redundancy, entropy, and coding became well-known intellectual resources among linguists at the time.
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