A. Ya. Khinchin (1894–1959)

This book develops Information Theory slightly further than Claude Shannon did. Although Khinchin praises Shannon for going and producing the ideas of Information Theory by himself, he acknowledges that the cases presented by Shannon were rather limited in scope to simplify the solutions.

The book as a whole is divided into two major sections; the first is called The Entropy Concept in Probability Theory and the second is called On The Fundamental Theorems of Information Theory. Both of these were originally papers printed by academic journals in the Russian Language.

The book was interesting, but I did pick out another short one, this book was only 120 pages long.… (mehr)

According to the opening preface of this book, Khinchin sent these Three Pearls of Number Theory to a former student recuperating during World War II. This is all the backstory that we are given for this. Khinchin claims that any schoolboy should be able to understand this stuff, but does admit that it is quite deep. It’s not that I don’t try to understand, but when I see the long lines of text that are supposed to denote numbers my attention wanders. It is rather shameful for me to say this. I guess a lack of structure really does have a bad part to it.

Anyway, this book was quite short; it measures a meager sixty-four pages in length. I would like to be able to understand what is going on with the proofs and all of that, so maybe I should revisit Velleman’s How To Prove It.… (mehr)

This book is quite challenging, but mostly because I don't know a lot about mathematics. If I knew more about grad and Lebesgue I suppose it would come out better. As I stand, I can't understand this book all that well, and I need to have a stepping stone for it. Sometimes being an autodidact is tough. No classes or anything really makes things complicated.

On the other hand, the book is written pretty well, it's mostly equations and text. Not a lot of pictures, it somewhat explains the units and symbols used, but I just don't have the background for it. Maybe if I revisit some Calculus and Linear Algebra and then come back to this book again.… (mehr)