The Bit Player is a 2019 documentary film created to celebrate the 2016 centenary of the birth of Claude Shannon, the “father of information theory”.

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as “the father of information theory”. Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, which he published in 1948.

He is also well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master’s degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship.[3] Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications.