The Importance of Being Ignorant

Rajaram Nityananda works in areas of physics and astronomy involving optical and statistical concepts. After increasing entropy at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore for more than two decades, he moved recently to the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Pune..

In many real life situations, we have to draw conclusions from data which are not complete and have been affected by measurement errors. Such problems have been addressed from the time of Bayes and Laplace (late 1700's) using concepts which are parallel Boltzmann's use of entropy in thermal physics. A critical - and sometimes controversial - input is 'prior probability', which represents our knowledge before any data are given or taken! This body of ideas is introduced in this article with simple examples.

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Address for Correspondence
R Nityananda 
National Centre for Radio Astrophysics 
Post Bag 3, Ganeshkhind 
Pune 411 007, India