Contents
When did E T Jaynes publish probability theory?
Editor’s foreword E. T. Jaynes died April 30, 1998. Before his death he asked me to finish and publish his book on probability theory. I struggled with this for some time, because there is no doubt in my mind that Jaynes wanted this book finished.
Why did Jaynes include calculations in his book?
Jaynes wanted to include a series of computer programs that implemented some of the calculations in the book. I had originally intended to include these programs.
What did Jaynes mean by much more coming?
There were a number of missing pieces of varying length that Jaynes had marked by inserting the phrase ‘much more coming’. I could have left these comments in the text, but they were ugly and they made the book look very incomplete. Jaynes intended this book to serve as both a reference and a text book.
Why are there question boxes in probability theory?
I could have left these comments in the text, but they were ugly and they made the book look very incomplete. Jaynes intended this book to serve as both a reference and a text book. Consequently, there are question boxes (Exercises) scattered throughout most chapters.
Is the Haldane prior an improper prior distribution?
The Haldane prior is an improper prior distribution (meaning that it has an infinite mass). Harold Jeffreys devised a systematic way for designing uninformative priors as e.g., Jeffreys prior p−1/2 (1 − p) −1/2 for the Bernoulli random variable.
How did I become interested in probability theory?
The present form of this work is the result of an evolutionary growth over many years. My interest in probability theory was stimulated first by reading the work of Harold Jeffreys (1939) and realizing that his viewpoint makes all the problems of theoretical physics appear in a very different light.
What do we need to know about probability theory?
We are concerned with probability theory and all of its conventional mathematics, but now viewed in a wider context than that of the standard textbooks. Every chapter after the first has ‘new’ (i.e. not previously published) results that we think will be found interesting and useful.