Information Theory
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a class="thought-link" href="brain://Qri9a8HQVE6g-Gzi4b1njQ/ClaudeShannon">Claude Shannon</a>, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information' itself, nor even addressing the question of the meaning of the message.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;">— Hans Christian von Baeyer (2003) <em>Information, The New Language of Science</em>. p. 28.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'</p>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;">— <a title="Claude Elwood Shannon" href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Claude_Elwood_Shannon">Claude Elwood Shannon</a> (1971) <em>Scientific American</em>, Vol 225, p. 180.</p>
<p>Just read the Wikipedia article on <a class="thought-link" href="brain://preview.webbrain.com/5IWkj_WbCkuk3zPNwDjZJQ/ttzxgkRc2k-q6F3OwfGMJA/InformationTheory">Information Theory</a> to see how important and pervasive these ideas have become.</p>
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