The Equation of Knowledge

[. . . ] Trained in the hard school of online videos, Le Nguyen Hoang has found a new tone to talk about science, a tone that is both rigorous and narrative, where examples illuminate the most abstract questions. - From the Foreword by Gilles Dowek, Professor at Ecole Polytechnique and researcher at the Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Ecole Polytechnique and the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). Le Nguyen Hoang takes us on a fascinating intellectual journey into Bayesianism, cutting across many social and natural sciences. The Equation of Knowledge: From Bayes' Rule to a Unified Philosophy of Science is a real page turner. -George Zaccour, HEC Montreal and co-author of Handbook of Dynamic Game Theory Making math accessible to everyone, showing its connections with dozens of different domains, narrating scientific discovery as a personal human adventure, and sharing impressive enthusiasm: there is definitely something of Greg Chaitin's Meta Math! in Le Nguyen Hoang's book! - Remi Peyre, Ecole des Mines de Nancy A remarkable piece of work, broad and insightful at the same time. This book is unique in that it gives an accessible journey from subtle probabilistic puzzles to the most advanced concepts at the heart of the machine learning revolution; with unrivalled clarity, it exposes deep ideas that have remained very confidential outside of specialized circles, and that yet are becoming fundamental in the way we understand our world. -Clement Hongler, Associate Professor and Chair of Statistical Field Theory, EPFL As someone who practices research and publishes academic papers, it is frustrating to note how little we, scientists, are trained in epistemology. 'How do we know that we know?' This question is often neglected or taken for granted. The recent controversies about reproducibility of scientific publishing might be one of the tips of a larger iceberg. This book will, in my opinion, be remembered as one of those that helped melt the iceberg. -El Mahdi El Mhamdi, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.