Weaver received three degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison: a Bachelor of Science in 1916, a civil engineering degree in 1917, and a Ph.D. in 1921.
When Claude Shannon's landmark 1948 articles on communication theory were republished in 1949 as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, the book also republished a much shorter article authored by Weaver, which discusses the implications of Shannon's more technical work for a general audience.