Abstract
Since its inception, the main role of information theory has been to provide the engineering and scientific communities with a mathematical framework for the theory of communication by establishing the fundamental limits on the performance of various communication systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Shannon borrowed the term “entropy” from statistical mechanics since his quantity admits the same expression as Boltzmann’s entropy [55].
- 2.
See [359] for accessing most of Shannon’s works, including his master’s thesis [337, 338] which made a breakthrough connection between electrical switching circuits and Boolean algebra and played a catalyst role in the digital revolution, his dissertation on an algebraic framework for population genetics [339], and his seminal paper on information-theoretic cryptography [342]. Refer also to [362] for a recent (nontechnical) biography on Shannon and [146] for a broad discourse on the history of information and on the information age.
- 3.
Except for a brief interlude with the continuous-time (waveform) Gaussian channel in Chap. 5, we will consider discrete-time communication systems throughout the text.
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Alajaji, F., Chen, PN. (2018). Introduction. In: An Introduction to Single-User Information Theory. Springer Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics and Technology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8001-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8001-2_1
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