Peter EliasIn existographies, Peter Elias (1923-2001) was an American electrical engineer and information theorist noted, in science, for his 1958 parody editorial article “Two Famous Papers”, wherein he critiqued two made-up articles, in the first of which he mocked the Shannon bandwagon effect of the ballooned usage of information theory in unwarranted applications in fields ‘outside’ of information theory, such as: religion, photosynthesis, psychology, business organization, genetics, linguistics, psychiatry, etc. some 16+ fields in total by the time of the third symposium on information theory, and in the second of which he did a Sokal affair stylized fictional article to mock the situation. [1]

Education
Elias attended Swarthmore College from 1940 to 1941, after which he transferred to MIT in 1942 completing his SB in business and engineering management in 1944. He then served two years in the US Navy, as a radio technician instructor and electronics technician. Following is discharge in 1946 Elias completed an MA in mechanical engineering and science and PhD from Harvard University. In 1953, he became a professor at MIT and in 1960, at the age of 37, became the head of the MIT electrical engineering and computer science department, the youngest ever to do so. [2]

Two Famous Papers
The following is Elias' very-humorous 1958 editorial article "Two Famous Papers" a parody of the Shannon bandwagon. [1]
Two Famous Papers (1958)
See the 2001 MIT Project History article “Information Theory and the Digital Age” for an inside look at Elias' role in the early bandwagon years. [3]

Sokal affair
In historical classification, the Elias "Two Famous Papers" editorial is classified as the "original" Sokal affair. Specifically, Elias second so-called famous (fictional) article, which Elias entitled "The Optimum Linear Mean Square Filter for Separating Sinusoidally modulated Trianglular Signals from Randomly Sampled Stationary Gaussian Noise, with Applications to a Problem in Radar", is but an early-prototype example of what has recently become categorized, in modern science writing, as a ‘Sokal affair’, the result of a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, who in early 1996 submitted an science article entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies, in which he proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct—but then, on its date of publication (May 1996), revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense, structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics." [4]

The similarity between the two is obvious—both are fake titles, making a parody of both authors who use overly-verbose and over-technical terminology, giving a false allusion of depth of truthfulness of content, and readers who are duped into believing in the content of such articles:

Elias (1958)

Sokal (1996)
“The Optimum Linear Mean Square Filter for Separating Sinusoidally modulated Trianglular Signals from Randomly Sampled Stationary Gaussian Noise, with Applications to a Problem in Radar.”
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”

The difference between the two is that in the Elias case it was an inside joke from the get go, particularly for regular readers and conference goers of the Institute of Radio Engineers, Transactions on Information Theory, whereas in the Sokal case, for the readers and editors of Social Text, the joke was on them.

Secondary corroboration that the use of Shannon’s 1948 information theory, outside of communication engineering proper, is the "original Sokal affair", as embodied in the parody humor of the second of Elias’ 1958 "Two Famous Papers" editorial, is the fact that American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims entitled his 2012 JHT article, on Shannon and the misuse of his information theory, as: “Thermodynamics ≠ Information Theory: Science’s Greatest Sokal Affair”, before he became aware of Elias and his "Two Famous Papers" Sokal affair style editorial, found through research. [5]

References
1. (a) Elias, Peter. (1958). “Two Famous Papers” (pdf), IRE Transactions: on Information Theory, 4(3):99, Sep.
(b) Mitra, Partha, and Bokil, Hemant. (2008). Observed Brain Dynamics (Appendix A: The Bandwagon by C.E. Shannon, pg. 343; Appendix B: The Two Famous Papers by Peter Elias, pg. 345). Oxford University Press.
2. Sales, Robert J. (2001). “MIT Professor Peter Elias Dies at 78; Was Computer Science Professor”, MIT News Office, Dec 10.
3. Aftab, O., Cheung, P., Kim, A., Thakkar, S., and Yeddanapudi, N. (2001). “Information Theory and the Digital Age” (§: Bandwagon, pgs. 9-11), Project History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
4. Sokal affair – Wikipedia.
5. Thims, Libb. (2012). “Thermodynamics ≠ Information Theory: Science’s Greatest Sokal Affair” (url), Journal of Human Thermodynamics, 8(1): 1-##, Nov.

External links
● Peter Elias – Wikipedia.

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