The Wholesome Story of an Amazing Mathematics Power Couple

Claude Shannon was a mathematical genius. From Scientific American:

His name has faded in our era, but in mid-20th century America, Claude Elwood Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories was a bona fide scientific star. In 1954, for example, Fortune featured Shannon in a list of the nation’s 20 most important scientists, alongside future Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson, among others. Shannon also made the pages of Time and Life magazines, appeared on national television, and even earned a spread in Vogue, complete with a photo shoot by the renowned Henri Cartier-Bresson.

There was ample reason for the acclaim. Shannon’s landmark 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” launched the field of information theory, and his stunning MIT master’s thesis proved that binary circuits could perform logic. Together, the two papers formed the basis for the digital age. And he wasn’t just a theorist: Theseus, an “artificially intelligent” mouse Shannon built, garnered national attention as an early example of a thinking machine.

His wife, Betty Shannon, was his unsung collaborator.

There was one collaborator, however, who has been written out of Shannon’s story. She was an unsung force behind his life and work, and she is one of the few who could not only keep up with Shannon but also stretch his horizons.

Her name was Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Moore, and Shannon first met her in 1948 at Bell Labs. Betty worked as one of the Labs’ “computers”—the women who did the mathematical calculations needed by the engineers. Betty had come to the Labs after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the New Jersey College for Women (now part of Rutgers University), which she attended on full scholarship. A gifted mathematical mind, she started work in Bell Labs’ mathematics department, focusing on microwave research, and then moved to the fast-growing radar group. In addition to her day-to-day work, she also published research, including a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum on “Composing Music by a Stochastic Process.”

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Nearly all who knew them testified to the quality of the match. Like Claude, Betty was matter-of-fact and whip-smart, with a wry sense of humor. But it wasn’t just their personalities that fit. Betty and Claude felt a strong intellectual kinship, too. She became a close advisor to him on mathematical matters. In fact, Betty became the first audience for many of Shannon’s ideas—the most notable exception to the introverted policy of a man who, as she herself put it, “wouldn’t go out of his way to collaborate with other people.”

They would work side by side. Betty looked up references, took down Claude’s thoughts and, importantly, edited his written work. She offered her improvements and added historical references. As Betty put it, “Some of his early papers and even later papers are in my handwriting…and not in his, which confused people at first.” And not just his papers: Betty was a full partner in the gadgeteering, too. In fact, it was Betty—not Claude—who completed the wiring for Theseus the mouse.

How wholesome. They met and he courted her in New York City.

Shy though he was, Shannon summoned the courage to ask her out to dinner. That dinner led to a second, the second to a third, until they were dining together every night. Shannon was smitten. As their dates grew longer and more frequent, they split time between his West Village apartment and hers on East Eighteenth Street. There, the two shared their mutual love of mathematics and music. “I played piano and he played clarinet,” Betty recalled, “and we’d come home from work, and we found some books of music that had two parts, and we’d enjoy playing together.”

The courtship progressed efficiently. Betty and Claude had met in the fall of 1948 and, by early the following year, Claude proposed—in his “not very formal” way, she recalled. She accepted, and, on March 22nd, 1949, they were married.