CSH Talk by Rudolf Hanel: “Process, history dependence, and entropy”

Rudolf Hanel’s talk will take place on April 28 at 2:15 pm in seminar room 101.

Abstract:

In different fields entropy has been conceptualized in different ways, resulting in a functional expression equivalent to Shannon-entropy. Therefore entropy is often thought of as a universal concept. This, however, is true only as long as the underlying processes in question are essentially Bernoulli processes leading to a degeneracy of most commonly used entropy concepts and the ubiquitous emergence of the particular functional form of Shannon-entropy. If the underlying process class in question becomes history dependent, also the expressions for the entropy functionals change. Then it becomes important which concepts we are using in order to define a notion of entropy. Whether we think of an extensive property of matter, information rates, or maximum configuration principles, it starts to make a difference. For history dependent processes, entropy is no longer uniquely defined and different entropy concepts have to be distinguished, informing us about distinct properties of the process. We discuss the general situation with simple history dependent example processes.