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Claude Elwood Shannon, 41, M.I.T. professor of electrical engineering and mathematics, the son of a Michigan lawyer, is, like his fellow M.I.T. math professor, "ex-Prodigy" Norbert Wiener, a world authority on electronic computers and cybernetics (the theory and application of control mechanisms, including those of the human brain). Fascinated with science ever since he was given an Erector set at eight, Shannon was educated at the University of Michigan, M.I.T. and Princeton, went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories during World War II. Still a consultant to Bell, Shannon calls himself an "inter-discipline man" who sees mathematics as the science most closely related to electrical engineering. "Perhaps one of the most challenging problems we face," says he, "is in making a machine to simulate the human mind." Shannon is a jazz addict, fashions devices such as the electronic maze-solving mouse, reads science-fiction and, says a friend, "like many scientists, works best at night, with plenty of cigarettes and coffee."