Claude Shannon was there first in the shoe electronics field 
I have noted that there seems to be a lack of consensus about who did what and when in these tales of Shannon and mathematician Edward Thorp in both the shoe computer caper and the blackjack operation. There also seems to be a lot of hand waving about whether they made any significant money doing it. A later follower of these guys, another physicist, Doyne Farmer, repeated a lot of this work in the '70s, with similar obscurity about results. Fun topic, anyway. Thorp and Farmer went on to be hedge fund managers.
