Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis

Chapter 6 is called "New Wires, New Logic (No Other Thing Is More Enswathed in the Unknown)." The chapter outlines some of the first steps in creating a formal system that merged mathematics and logic.

Claude Shannon was a brilliant young man who grew up fascinated with cryptograms. After studying electrical engineering, he took a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working for Vannevar Bush who had created a "Differential Analyzer." This was a machine similar to the one that Charles Babbage had envisioned, which used mechanical methods to solve complex equations. Shannon learned a good deal about the relay switches that were part of the analyzer and used them as the subject of a graduate paper in which he applied the binary logic of George Boole to a system of relays. Relay switches can either be open or closed. They...