克劳德·艾尔伍德·香农（Claude Elwood Shannon，1916年4月30日－2001年2月26日），美国数学家、电子工程师和密码学家，被誉为信息论的创始人。香农是密西根大学学士，麻省理工学院博士。

1948年，香农发表了划时代的论文——通信的数学原理，奠定了现代信息论的基础。不仅如此，香农还被认为是数字计算机理论和数字电路设计理论的创始人。1937年，21岁的香农是麻省理工学院的硕士研究生，他在其硕士论文中提出，将布尔代数应用于电子领域，能够构建并解决任何逻辑和数值关系，被誉为有史以来最具水平的硕士论文之一。二战期间，香农为军事领域的密码分析——密码破译和保密通信——做出了很大贡献。

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory".

Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper that he published in 1948. He is perhaps equally well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical, numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his basic work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications.