Claude Shannon's ``A mathematical theory of communication'' was first published in two parts in the July and October 1948 editions of the Bell System Technical Journal [1]. The paper has appeared in a number of republications since:

• The original 1948 version was reproduced in the collection Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory [2]. The paper also appears in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers [3]. The text of the latter is a reproduction from the Bell Telephone System Technical Publications, a series of monographs by engineers and scientists of the Bell System published in the BSTJ and elsewhere. This version has correct section numbering (the BSTJ version has two sections numbered 21), and as far as we can tell, this is the only difference from the BSTJ version.
• Prefaced by Warren Weaver's introduction, ``Recent contributions to the mathematical theory of communication,'' the paper was included in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1949 [4]. The text in this book differs from the original mainly in the following points:
  • the title is changed to ``The mathematical theory of communication'' and some sections have new headings,
  • Appendix 4 is rewritten,
  • the references to unpublished material have been updated to refer to the published material.

The text we present here is based on the BSTJ version with a number of corrections. (The version on this site before May 18th 1998 was based on the University of Illinois Press version.)

Here you can find a PostScript (460 Kbytes), gzipped PostScript (146 Kbytes) and pdf (358 Kbytes) version of Shannon's paper. PDF files can be viewed by Adobe's acrobat reader. Tarred and gzipped contents of the directory (63 Kbytes) that contain the LaTeX code for the paper is also available.

1

C. E. Shannon, ``A mathematical theory of communication,'' Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp. 379-423 and 623-656, July and October, 1948.

2

D. Slepian, editor, Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory, New York: IEEE Press, 1974.

3

N. J. A. Sloane and A. D. Wyner, editors, Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, New York: IEEE Press, 1993.

4

W. Weaver and C. E. Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1949, republished in paperback 1963.