Sunday, May 15, 2016

Quote of the Day

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.

- John von Neumann,  Quoted by M. Tribus — Scientific American, 225, “Energy and Information”, p. 180, 1971, Suggestion of von Neumann to Shannon regarding the name of his new uncertainty function

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