A Diary on Information Theory

by Alfréd Rényi

This book conveys to the non-specialist some of the deepest ideas in mathematics. The first chapter, On the Mathematical Notion of Information, is a sequel to the author's previous works, Dialogues on Mathematics , and Letters on Probability . Other chapters provide thoughtful discussion of the teaching of probability theory, the diverse and surprising applications of the work of Fibonacci, and a mathematician's battle with the casinos. Provides basic introduction to what mathematics is and how it applies to everyday life.

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Vaishakh Ravi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Information theory started almost singlehandedly with Shannon’s "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", laying down the foundations of the modern digital age.

I'm going to be a doing a PhD in information theory and I'll forever remember this book since I was first introduced and drawn to the topic through it. In this book, Renyi presents the subject as a journal written by a student of his information theory course. Simple in language but mature in rigor, it's a delightful and fun read! I would strongly recommend this book to every theoretically oriented EECS major.

[rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

I needed this book in order to find bounds for a 20 Questions game modelled as Huffman coding which in this book is referred to as Bar-kochba. In this book, I found why and how we label a binary tree in the form of 0 and 1s in order to represent no and yes', insight into how the code is formed and the number of questions needed to guess an element of a set on average. I found that log base 2 (N) could bound this and later in the diary it was revealed that this value is similar to the entropy. This book, covers a variety of topics like probability and fibonacci sequences. I will keep searching for what I am looking for.