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Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Department of Mechanical Engineering |
6.050J / 2.110J Information and Entropy Spring 2004 |
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Invitation to Freshmen
The following e-mail message was sent to MIT freshmen November 26, 2003.
X-Sender: friedman@po10.mit.edu
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 15:25:21 -0500
To: (Freshmen)
From: "Paul Penfield, Jr." <penfield@MIT.EDU>
Subject: 6.050J / 2.110J Information and Entropy
Cc: penfield@MIT.EDU, slloyd@MIT.EDU, Julie Norman <jbnorman@MIT.EDU>,
Karen Blose <blose@MIT.EDU>
Dear Freshman,
You are probably thinking now about your academic schedule for Spring
2004. We invite you to consider a freshman subject that we have been
developing for the past three years, and which appeared in the MIT
catalog for the first time last year.
The subject is 6.050J / 2.110J Information and Entropy. This 6-unit
course fits into a typical freshman 57-unit Spring program, even one
that includes a 15-unit subject like 6.001. You can sign up for either
2.110J or 6.050J.
We will explore the concept of information. Like energy, information
has many forms. It can be transmitted from place to place or stored
for later use. It can be converted from one form to another by both
physical and computational processes, some of them reversible and some
not. We will look at information in diverse areas - computation,
biology, communications, and thermodynamics.
One form of information in physical systems is known as entropy, a
quantity that obeys one of the most profound and mysterious physical
principles, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We will consider the
Second Law as a result of information processing in physical systems.
Other topics include the genetic code, compression, channel capacity,
TCP/IP, and quantum computing.
See more at the course home page http://mtlsites.mit.edu/Courses/6.050.
Paul Penfield, Jr.
D. C. Jackson Professor of Electrical Engineering
Room 38-344
617-253-2506
penfield@mit.edu
Seth Lloyd
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Room 3-160
617-252-1803
slloyd@mit.edu
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