Information Theory: A Gentle Introduction

This is the first in a series of articles about Information Theory and its relationship to data driven enterprises and strategy. While there will be some equations in each section, they can largely be ignored for those less interested in the details and more in the implications. The early and middle parts of the 20th century saw an explosion in telecommunication technologies and capabilities. In doing so these researchers accidentally built one of the most powerful set of tools applied math has given us for approaching and solving a myriad of otherwise'not so mathy' problems. Over the course of the first few article we'll introduce 5 tools -- Entropy, Mutual Information, Huffman Codes, Kolmogorov Complexity and Fisher Information -- for assessing these and other challenges in both personal and professional life. If you talk to a quantitative professional and ask them how long they've been at it the usual, diplomatic answer involves their number of years since finishing undergrad.