The Entropy Zoo

I am going through the draft of a chapter that includes a survey of similarity measures (and I'll need to see if an appropriate survey exists, as we should use this material to help write one if it doesn't), and the appearance of information-theoretic measures naturally made me think of the Entropy Zoo, which I saw yesterday on the Quantum Frontiers blog.

(Who's down with en-tro-py?!?)

Yakov Sinai Wins Abel Prize

We've got a win for the home team (aka: dynamical systems) today: Yakov ("Yasha") Sinai has won the Abel Prize!

This is richly deserved. And if you look at this last page and know my academic interests, you'll see many subjects that are near and dear to my heart --- like dynamical systems, billiards, chaos, etc.

A few years ago, I tried to get Yasha interested in the two-particle billiards on which I have worked a bit with Bunimovich and a couple of students. He brought up some very good ideas, obviously, but he didn't seem super interested in the problem.

Also, as far as mathematical lineage goes, this one is a big win for the home team in a very large sense (well beyond dynamical systems). Besides having worked on billiard problems, there is pretty direct lineage: my official postdoc mentor at Georgia Tech was Leonid ("Lyonia") Bunimovich, who was a PhD student of Sinai.

Update: Here is the blurb in Nature News.


Update (4/10/14): There is now an article about Sinai's Abel Prize in The Daily Princetonian. I love Lyonia's quote in the article (because it's typical Lyonia): "I was waiting for this event already for some years."

Scientific entropy

Who's down with entropy? (Yeah, you know me.)

I was brainstorming at Peet's this evening -- I was thinking quite productively, actually, because I also came up with an excellent idea for an expository article -- and I came up with a way of defining "entropy" for scientists. The formula is simple:

scientific entropy = log(arrogance/talent)

For other types of entropy, see wikipedia.

One could (and should), of course, incorporate things like reputation and things that cause such time-dependent phenomena (such as number of papers, citations, etc), but let's just keep it simple. The more talented you are, the more people will put up with your shit (i.e., the more arrogance you can exhibit).

As John von Neumann once said while talking to Claude Shannon, "Nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."