Connecting Information to Knowledge, Meaning, and Consequences.

What is it About?

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, and little more than an understanding of logarithms and sums is needed.

The Author

Dr. Jan Hoh completed gymnasium in Uppsala, Sweden, and studied biology at Illinois State University. He then obtained a Ph.D. in Cellular Biology and Biophysics from the California Institute of Technology. In 1994 Jan joined the faculty of the Department of Physiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he for 21 years taught and conducted research in macromolecular and cellular biophysics. His research at Johns Hopkins led to an interest in information in biological systems, which was the genesis of this book. In 2015 Jan left academia to join a small biotech startup in Boulder, CO, and finally finish this book!

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Connecting Information to Knowledge, Meaning, and Consequences.

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What is it About?

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