Editorial

As befits the role of an American mathematician in modern society, I have nothing practical to say about information theory. However the devotees of this theory may be interested in the reactions of an outsider who has followed some of its development. In spite of all the suggestive work by Wiener, Shannon, and their successors, the main thing that strikes an outsider is that there are so few theoretical results. Even more extraordinary is the fact that this process of organizing what seems to be the very basis of the subject seems to have no effect whatever on its applications! Can it be that the existence of a mathematical basis is irrelevant, and that the basic principle is the very idea that there is a context in which the word "information" is accepted by general agreement and used in an intuitive way, and that no more is needed?