The shannon is a unit of information named after Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory. IEC 80000-13 defines the shannon as the information content associated with an event when the probability of the event occurring is 1/2. It is understood as such within the realm of information theory, and is conceptually distinct from the bit, a term used in data processing and storage to denote a single instance of a binary signal. A sequence of n binary symbols is properly described as consisting of n bits, but the information content of those n symbols may be more or less than n shannons depending on the a priori probability of the actual sequence of symbols.