>One of his contemporaries, remarking on the peculiarity of

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>One of his contemporaries, remarking on the peculiarity of a world-class mathematician with a serious interest in unicycles, put Shannon’s love of these strange machines specifically, as well as his passions generally, in perspective: “He was not interested in forming a company to build unicycles. He was interested in finding out what made unicycles fun and finding out more about them.”

>Toward the end of his life, Shannon still maintained his cheekiness, his insouciance toward even the highest of the highbrow. After promising Scientific American an article on the physics of juggling, his attention drifted—and he chanced on an entirely unrelated project. From that came this note to his editor, written in 1981:

>Dear Dennis:
>You probably think I have been fritterin’, I say fritterin’, away my time while my juggling paper is languishing on the shelf. This is only half true. I have come to two conclusions recently:
>1) I am a better poet than scientist. 2) Scientific American should have a poetry column.
>You may disagree with both of these, but I enclose “A Rubric on Rubik Cubics” for you.
>Sincerely,Claude E. Shannon
>P.S. I am still working on the juggling paper.

>What followed was a 70-line poem on the subject of Rubik’s cubes, “sung to ‘Ta-Ra-Ra! Boom-De-Ay!’” and complete with footnotes. And it was clear from the rhyme and rhythm that the author had spent time playing with the words on his tongue, rearranging them in his head, singing them aloud to himself. The project was seriously unserious.

>And the juggling article? Like so many artifacts of Shannon’s mind, it acquired dust. Shannon’s attention had shifted, and whatever he needed to say about juggling had been said, at least to his satisfaction. He did, however, have one regret about the episode. He was disappointed that his poem never made it into the pages of Scientific American.

>Laughing, he declared, “That’s one of my great works!”

Was it autism?