Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction

In 1948, Claude Shannon published a paper called A Mathematical Theory of Communication[1]. This paper heralded a transformation in our understanding of information. Before Shannon's paper, information had been viewed as a kind of poorly defined miasmic fluid. But after Shannon's paper, it became apparent that information is a well-defined and, above all, measurable quantity. Indeed, as noted by Shannon, A basic idea in information theory is that information can be treated very much like a physical quantity, such as mass or energy.