as a message came into prominence with the publication in 1948 of an influential paper by Claude Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." This paper provides the foundations of information theory and endows the word information not only with a technical meaning but also a measure. If the sending device is equally likely to send any one of a set of N messages, then the preferred measure of "the information produced when one message is chosen from the set" is the base two logarithm of N (This measure is called self-information). In this paper, Shannon cont
《A mathematical theory of communication》，Shannon信息論的開山之作，此文可以看作是現代通信的理論基礎。文中提出熵作為信息的度量，個人認為仍是不可替代的。在量子信息中提出的量子信息熵，可以看作是一種模仿。學理工科的人都應該好好學習看看。當然，同時期的蘇聯科學家從數學的角度（概率論）給出了幾乎一模一樣的結果。只是過程更加抽象與嚴謹。
