Claude E. Shannon was a University of Michigan graduate -- BSE EE '36, BSE Math '36. His legendary 1948 paper, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" unveiled the vast potential for digital communications and inspired virtually all of the work in digital communications that followed. He is ... famous for his work on cryptography, the sampling theorem, and the discovery of the relevance of Boolean algebra to logic circuit design. He is considered to be one of the people most responsible for ushering in the digital age.