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A clue to the origins of Shannon’s genius can be found in the sheer scope of his intellectual interests. He was a peculiar sort of engineer – one known for juggling and riding a unicycle through Bell Labs’ corridors, and whose creations included a flame-throwing trumpet, a calculator called ‘THROBAC’ that operated in Roman numerals (short for ‘Thrifty Roman-Numeral Backward-Looking Computer’), and a mechanical mouse named Theseus that could locate a piece of metallic cheese in a maze. Genetics, artificial intelligence, computer chess, jazz clarinet and amateur poetry numbered among his other pursuits. Some of these predated his work on information theory, while he turned to others later in life. But what remained constant was Shannon’s ability to be as captivated by the capering spectacle of life and language as he was by physics and numbers. Information had begun, after all, as a philosophical term of art, and getting at its foundations entailed just the sort of questions we might expect a linguist or a philosopher to take up.