I don’t know anything personal about Claude Shannon, but I expect he’s the kind of model referenced. He’s at the top of the heap, but it’s a heap many of us are delighted to be part of. As far as I know, he had a boring superficial personality and had no interest in putting himself out there. Within his intellectual community he was a rock star in his lifetime, and he will be referenced up to the end of technology.
The few times he’s on film, his dry prescient humor comes through (“Incidentally the things we learn for the telephone system have other applications.”). Reading his master’s thesis is astonishing; it is clear and illustrative and this allowed immediate recognition and use of the ideas, and to this day they are used in more and more ways. That alone is inspirational and I can and do use them. I want to be like him, and I can be to a degree because he explains his ideas with clarity.
Boltzmann, Gibbs, Noether and others fall in the same category; relatively ordinary lives and maybe not movie material, but the stuff of intellectual legend, with accomplishments that we can understand and aspire to.
