This is a collection of notes on the book "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" by E. T. Jaynes. These notes contain solutions to some of the exercises, details of some of the derivations and some general comments.
This document is for any information that you want to pass on to future readers. This will help people catch up with the reading group, and serves as a good way to share proofs and highlights of discussion. If we make it through the whole book, we can share it online, with credit to everyone who contributed. The plan is to make one markdown file per chapter, whose purpose will be to fill details of proofs, point out errors and controversial points, preserve some of the highlights of our discussions, answer common questions, link to further resources, and (hopefully) provide solutions to the exercises.
Feel free to copy and rehost this content.
Feel free to make a pull request, or send me a message and I'll add you as an author of this repo if you want to contribute, or just post your contribution on reddit and I'll format it and add it to the document. If you see any mistakes in the proofs, please either let me know or correct it. Don't hesitate to edit/improve other people's proofs.
The files to write in are markdown files (.md), which can be compiled into many other formats with pandoc, or viewed with many different editors. I've found markdown to be the easiest way to take notes with equations. Pandoc Markdown syntax is defined here, and is a superset of several markdown formats (I think) that includes extra features. There's a cheatsheet here, and there's some example formatting and equations in the files chapter1.md and pdf.
We'll mostly be using equations, which are typed using Latex syntax. Inline equations are surrounded by $ signs like
Lots of editors can be used to edit markdown while displaying the resulting formatted text and equations. Whatever text editor you prefer probably has a plugin to display markdown. I like Typora, and StackEdit can be good if you want one that runs in a browser. Or you can just edit the plaintext.
If you aren't comfortable using git, you can edit in the browser by clicking on a .md file and then clicking on the edit button in the top right corner. After you've finished, click "Propose file change". (If I've added you as a contributor, the button will say "Commit changes").
After editing the markdown files, you can compile it to other formats with pandoc using the commands below. If it doesn't compile, it usually means there's a latex syntax error in an equation. You don't have to compile before pushing changes if you don't want to, but it'd be good to make sure it works.
pandoc chapter1.md -f markdown -s -o chapter1.pdf
pandoc chapter1.md -f markdown --mathjax -s -o chapter1.html
You can view the html files in this repository online here.