I recently watched a charming documentary on Shannon, called The Bit Player [0]. The film has some annoying flaws, but it really highlights how much Shannon was outside the box for a mathematician. He seems to have been extremely playful, and tinkering with hardware projects throughout his life.

How he even managed to make a (very limited) endgame chess computer [1] ~70 years ago still blows my mind.

[0] https://thebitplayer.com/

[1] https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-man-who-built-the-che...