A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits (the typewritten thesis, 1937)

This is the library copy of Claude Shannon's thesis as he submitted it, typed, 72 pages, with the title page dated August 10, 1937 and his degree from the University of Michigan listed beneath his name. The signatures of the author, his supervising professor and the chairman of the graduate committee have been redacted in the scan. The Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT was where he submitted it.

The typescript is the full argument that the 1938 journal paper later condensed. Its table of contents runs from an introduction on types of problems, through series-parallel circuits, definitions and postulates, and an analogue with the calculus of propositions, to multi-terminal networks, matrix methods, special types of relays and the synthesis of networks. The journal paper had to compress that sequence, and here the sequence is whole.