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Shannon's Master's Thesis (see above and [Sha48]) was the first work to make him famous. He became intrigued by the switching circuits controlling the differential analyzer while working for Vannevar Bush. He was the first to notice that the work of a mathematics professor named George Boole in Cork, Ireland, done a century earlier, yielded the necessary mathematical framework for analyzing such circuits.

“On” and “Off” could be represented by “1” and “0.” The Boolean logical operations of AND, OR correspond exactly to a circuit with two switches in series, or in parallel, respectively. He demonstrated that any logical statement, no matter how complex, could be implemented physically as a network of such switches. He also showed how the crucial Boolean decision operation could be implemented in a digital system marking the main qualitative difference between a calculator and the powerful digital computers to follow.