Claude E. Shannon died on Saturday, February 24th, 2001, at the age of 84 He had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for many years. He was the father of Information Theory and a tireless inventor with formidable results in the fields of communications, signal processing, cryptography, genetics, computers, automata, circuits, and juggling theory. He was also famous for building a mechanical maze-solving mouse called Theseus, for being an excellent juggler and a master of the unicycle, and for illegaly attempting to climb on top of the round roof of MIT's main auditorium (as reported by Prof. Fano, who managed to persuade MIT's police force not to arrest Dr. Shannon). He was described by many as being a true genius and one of the greatest inventors of the twentieth century.