A better first choice would be Shannon. In the case of information theory, I’d say the Great Man model is just obviously basically correct.
Hmm, I think information theory was due to the work of only a few people, but I seem to recall that various people at Bell Labs claim that they came up with basically similar stuff around the same as Shannon (and that Shannon took more credit than was due). (I can’t find a source for this after very quickly looking, so maybe I’m just wrong.)
Of course, Shannon wrote the seminal work in the area which outlined basically all the key problems and proved nearly all the key results, regardless of whether other people came up with these results first.
Even if it’s true that Shannon claimed more credit than he was due, I still think that only a few people were involved with the creation of information theory. So maybe not lone genius, but only a few geniuses.
I think you might be confusing Shannon with Shockley, one of the guys who worked on the transistor? In that case there were definitely other people working on it, and Shockley was pretty unambiguously kind-of-an-asshole who definitely tried to grab credit.
In Shannon’s case, everything I’ve read (notably including The Idea Factory) indicates that Shannon basically developed the whole thing, came out of left field and surprised basically everyone.
Hmm, I think information theory was due to the work of only a few people, but I seem to recall that various people at Bell Labs claim that they came up with basically similar stuff around the same as Shannon (and that Shannon took more credit than was due). (I can’t find a source for this after very quickly looking, so maybe I’m just wrong.)
Of course, Shannon wrote the seminal work in the area which outlined basically all the key problems and proved nearly all the key results, regardless of whether other people came up with these results first.
Even if it’s true that Shannon claimed more credit than he was due, I still think that only a few people were involved with the creation of information theory. So maybe not lone genius, but only a few geniuses.
I think you might be confusing Shannon with Shockley, one of the guys who worked on the transistor? In that case there were definitely other people working on it, and Shockley was pretty unambiguously kind-of-an-asshole who definitely tried to grab credit.
In Shannon’s case, everything I’ve read (notably including The Idea Factory) indicates that Shannon basically developed the whole thing, came out of left field and surprised basically everyone.