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76

La Lettre

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Claude Shannon (1916-2001)

that separates men, who are intuitive but slow and not very rigorous despite their efforts, and hyperfast

computers, which are unable to make mistakes but lack common sense and intuition. In computer science,

bugs are failures from the programmers, not from the programs themselves. Turing himself wondered then

how to bypass this difficulty, either by mathematically proving that programs are correct – and we have

improved, there – or by using software able to confer some form of intelligence to computers: strength is

always in the software, no on the bare circuit board.

At the beginning of the 1950s, other conceptual revolutions occurred. We owe

to Claude Shannon the revolution of the theory of information. First aimed

at understanding and optimizing the transportation of information on noisy

telephone lines, this theory has become of major importance in many

fields: telecommunications, sound and image compression, general signal

processing, optimization of major networks such as the Internet, etc. At the

same time, process control was born as a new science devoted to analyzing

and controlling physical systems. Maxwell and Wiener were its pioneers, and

it has been well illustrated by our fellow Pierre Faurre on both its research and

industrial sides. And Jacques-Louis Lions’ exceptional personality honoured our company by giving rise

to the use of numerical analysis to solve more and more complex equations and by promoting all forms

of applied mathematics.