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Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan in 1916. His father was a business man who later became a judge, and his mother was a high schoolteacher. As a youngster he was interested in, and became adept at, handling all kinds of contraptions such as model airplanes and boats as well as learning the workings of the telegraph system. At the age of 20, he graduated with degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan.

In the summer of 1936, Claude joined the MIT Electric Engineering department as a research assistant to work on an analog computer (as opposed to our modern digital computers) under the supervision of Vannevar Bush. Bush's analog computer, called a differential analyzer, was the most advanced calculator of the era and was used mainly for solving differential equations. A relay circuit associated with the analyzer used hundreds of relays and was a source of serious study by Shannon, then, and later.

During the summer of 1937, Shannon obtained an internship at Bell Laboratories and returned to MIT to work on a Master's thesis. In September 1938, he moved to the Mathematics Department of MIT and wrote a thesis in genetics with the title An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics graduating in 1940 with his PhD degree in Mathematics and the S.M. degree in Electrical Engineering.

Dr. Shannon spent the academic year of 1940–1941 at the Princeton Institute where he worked with Herman Weyl, the famous group‐theorist and geometer. Subsequently, he spent a productive 15 years at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey returning to MIT in 1956, first as a visiting professor and then, in 1958, as Donner Professor of Science. This was a joint appointment between mathematics and electrical engineering. Here he did not teach ordinary courses but gave frequent seminars. According to Horgan and Claude [Hor90], he once gave an entire seminar course, with new results at each lecture!

He retired from MIT in 1978 but continued to work on many different problems including portfolio theory for the stock market, computer chess, juggling, and artificial intelligence. He died in 2001, at the age of 84 a few years after the onset of Alzheimer's Disease.