Information: From Symbols and Messages to Knowledge and Meaning

ISBN-10: 1734847107
ISBN-13: 9781734847109
Series: Information
Language: English
Published: 2020-05
Author: Jan Hoh

Description

This book is about information in a broad sense of the word. Information is an important concept that imbues our world in many different ways. Yet, it remains poorly understood outside of scientists and engineers that use information theory in their work. Just ask someone you know to define information. The odds are that the answer will not be very satisfying. This book explains the roots of information that arise from the work Nyquist, Hartley and Shannon in the first half of the 20th century, and which lie at the foundation of how modern communications systems are built. It then extends those ideas to describe how knowledge and meaning arise from information, principally from concepts developed by Kullback, Leibler, and Jeffreys. Finally, it deals with the consequences of information and how information changes the world around us. The presentation lies between popular science where the mathematics is avoided and academic books that are to varying degrees mathematically advanced. The basic mathematics needed to understand information is presented as gently as possible.