Eric just sent along the following summary of our upcoming sessions:
This Friday at NECSI is Info Theory again: we’ll be talking specifically about the coordinate-dependence of differential (continuous) entropy and more generally, discussing the rest of Part III of Shannon’s paper. The next topic after that will be “Error-Correcting Codes in Biology“, which will probably take a few weeks at least — we’ll first cover the relevant sections of Ash (or Reza or whatever people prefer) and then talk about the biological basics.
This next Monday is Stat Mech and I will be reviewing the ensembles we have covered so far and talking at NECSI about the Gibbs-canonical and grand-canonical ensembles. Depending on time I will prove (in a physicist way) that all of the ensembles are equivalent within their own ranges of assumptions — so this may take one or two lectures. After that I will probably assign some homework so that we can get experience working with these tools.
Links added by me, because this is Xanadu 2.0, after all.
Yesterday evening, we had our first seminar session on the group theory track, led by Ben Allen. We covered the definition of groups, semigroups and monoids, and we developed several examples by transforming a pentagon. After a brief interlude on discrete topology and — no snickers, please — pointlesstopology, Ben introduced the concept of generators and posed several homework questions intended to lead us into the study of Lie groups and Lie algebras.
Notes are available in PDF format, or as a gzipped tarball for those who wish to play with the original LaTeX source. Likewise, the current notes for the entropy and information-theory seminar track (the Friday sessions) are available in both PDF and tarball flavors.
Welcome to Science After Sunclipse, a blag devoted (more or less) to discussing mathematics and physics. Your hosts, including a soft-spoken and ever-humble Order of the Molly recipient (me), currently run a seminar series grandly entitled the “Do It Yourself University”. Typically hosted at the New England Complex Systems Institute, our sessions cover topics in statistical physics, information theory, topology and. . . well. . . whatever else strikes our collective fancy. Continue reading Welcome to Web 3.11 for Workgroups→
"no matter how gifted, you alone cannot change the world"
