11 Facts About Information theory

Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of digital information.

Some other important measures in information theory are mutual information, channel capacity, error exponents, and relative entropy.

Important sub-fields of information theory include source coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory and information-theoretic security.

The theory has found applications in other areas, including statistical inference, cryptography, neurobiology, perception, linguistics, the evolution and function of molecular codes, thermal physics, molecular dynamics, quantum computing, black holes, information retrieval, intelligence gathering, plagiarism detection, pattern recognition, anomaly detection and even art creation.

Coding Information theory is concerned with finding explicit methods, called codes, for increasing the efficiency and reducing the error rate of data communication over noisy channels to near the channel capacity.

Landmark event establishing the discipline of information theory and bringing it to immediate worldwide attention was the publication of Claude E Shannon's classic paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell System Technical Journal in July and October 1948.

Ralph Hartley's 1928 paper, Transmission of Information theory, uses the word information as a measurable quantity, reflecting the receiver's ability to distinguish one sequence of symbols from any other, thus quantifying information as, where S was the number of possible symbols, and n the number of symbols in a transmission.

Information theory is based on probability theory and statistics, where quantified information is usually described in terms of bits.

Coding theory is one of the most important and direct applications of information theory.

Information theory leads us to believe it is much more difficult to keep secrets than it might first appear.

Information theory has applications in gambling, black holes, and bioinformatics.