Abstract
The description of a physical system requires the knowledge of some information, for example the prediction of the motion of a point particle in classical mechanics requires the knowledge of its initial position and momentum besides, of course, the system of forces acting upon it. In the case of a great quantity of particles, i.e. of the order of the Avogadro’s number (6.022 × 1023), the information for a detailed description of the motion of every particle are practically not available; therefore distribution functions and statistical methods are introduced in order to describe the behavior of complex systems.
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- 1.
\(\log x\) will be always intended as the natural logarithm.
- 2.
Indeed Shannon used log2 in his definition because he had in mind the two binary states (0 and 1) of the information so that entropy is measured in bits, but this detail is not important for the purposes of this book.
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Camiola, V.D., Mascali, G., Romano, V. (2020). Maximum Entropy Principle. In: Charge Transport in Low Dimensional Semiconductor Structures. Mathematics in Industry(), vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35993-5_2
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