Shannon's engineering layer and the statistical laws of symbol streams. Reclassified here from the marketing communication map (2026-08-05): these are the actual mathematics that the communication models borrow; consumers link in.
- shannon-entropy — H(X), the source's irreducible rate
- channel-capacity — the ceiling the channel imposes
- mutual-information — what the received says about the sent
- redundancy — the margin that buys error tolerance
- zipf-law — rank-frequency power law of symbol use
- heaps-law — vocabulary growth against text length
Kin: cybernetics (the sibling discipline that grew from the same era), models (the communication map that consumes this layer).