The book is a collection of articles by the outstanding mathematician and engineer, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Claude Elvood Shannon. Many of the works included in the collection published by prof. Shannon in various journals in 1938-1962 laid the foundation for new areas of research in the field of general communication theory, automata theory, electrical engineering, information theory and linguistics, such as the theory of analysis and synthesis of relay devices, the theory of probabilistic schemes, the theory of information transmission, etc.