Über einige Grundbegriffe der Informationstheorie

Summary

The author explains the basic ideas of thetheory of information, in particular

• the information content of a message or a symbol from a source,

• the average information content (per symbol) of a source (entropy),

• the redundancy of a “language”,

• the channel, and the channel capacity.

Starting from simple examples and considerations of plausibility these conceptions are formulated in an elementary mathematical language, trying to avoid too much generality in the interest of an easier understanding. For further studies, reference is made to the bibliography on information theory byL. Schmetterer, published in this journal on the following pages.