The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey

The article surveys the development of a scientific conceptualization of information during and in the decade following World War II. It examines the roots of information science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mathematical logic, physics, psychology, and electrical engineering, and then focuses on how Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener combined these diverse studies into a coherent discipline.