Claude Shannon: The juggling father of the information age who coined the term 'bit'

From building two-seater unicycles, juggling robots to creating chess-playing machines, Claude Elwood Shannon was not just an information theorist. The gifted mathematician also used his skills to analyse the stock market with a system he designed though his methods remained unpublished. The American electrical engineer and cryptographer was the grandson of an inventor and a distant cousin of Thomas Edison and would earn money by repairing radios when he was a schoolboy. He went on to study electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1936, and obtained his PhD in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1940. During the Second World War, he designed equipment to intercept V1 and V2 missiles and in Axis code-breaking and while working at Bell Labs, he is believed to have met codebreaker Alan Turing, though there is no record of their meeting.