Kirthana Rajasekar: What is entropy?

The word entropy comes from the Greek, "en" meaning "in" and "tropy" meaning "turning". If you have heard of entropy before, you wouldn't be surprised that the process of me writing this abstract has a lower entropy than the process of generating an equally long text with "random" letters. In the pre-colloquium, we will formalise these intuitions and briefly discuss the historical context of it.

We will introduce the concept of Shannon's entropy, in probability theory, and discuss some of its important properties, albeit through a few specific examples. If time permits, we will discuss Kolmogorov's entropy and its part in the story of dynamical systems and ergodic theory.