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Books about Information Theory

This is a brief list of essential books about Shannon's information theory. There are many more that you can find at book stores by searching for 'information theory'. There are also other measures that are called "information", such as Fisher information, but this web site focuses on Shannon information because that can be tied to physical entropy (see my edmm paper).

An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John Robinson Pierce. This is still a good introduction to information theory. It gives the ideas whereas later books either forget the basic ideas or dump lots of math on the reader without explanation. Pierce also gave a nice talk at Bell Labs in December, 1951 on CREATIVE THINKING.
Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver. This is the original paper by Shannon with an introduction by Weaver.

This book is now available on line! at Bell Labs
Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers by Claude E. Shannon, N.J.A. Sloane, Aaron D.Wyner. This contains everything that Shannon wrote!

color bar Small icon for Theory of Molecular Machines: physics,
chemistry, biology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory,
genetic engineering, sequence logos, information theory,
electrical engineering, thermodynamics, statistical
mechanics, hypersphere packing, gumball machines, Maxwell's
Daemon, limits of computers

Schneider Lab
origin: 1996 February 14
updated: 2014 Nov 10
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