Claude Shannon publishes in 1937 'A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,' his master's thesis at MIT, demonstrating that Boole's Boolean algebra (1854) exactly describes the behavior of electrical switching circuits. Shannon establishes that any logical function can be implemented via combinations of electrical relays, and that a circuit's open/closed states correspond to the 0/1 values of Boolean algebra. This thesis is considered one of the most influential of the 20th century: it turns an 1854 mathematical abstraction into the design basis for all digital hardware. Shannon later published 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' (1948), founding information theory and coining the term 'bit.'