Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory". He was the first to describe the Boolean gates that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and he built the first machine learning device, thus founding the field of artificial intelligence. He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.

Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the latter half of the 19th century after the commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, and electrical power generation, distribution, and use.