[zawerf]

This was such an amazing read. The historical notes are awesome and not what I expected from a math textbook. I should really buy a copy of Jaynes!

Some teasers for others who might want to read it:

- The proof in this blog post is called the Hershel-Maxwell derivation. The weird assumptions were motivated by astronomy for finding the 2d distribution of errors of stars

- Gauss was the one who saw the maximum likelihood application. This is why we name it gaussian distribution despite being discovered earlier by others such as de Moivre. Laplace was the bro who expanded and popularized Gauss's work!

- ^ That was like the first two pages of the chapter

[BenoitEssiambre]

I'm glad you liked it. :-) The whole book is an amazing read. It's what sparked my interest in probability theory a decade ago. Unfortunately, it's unfinished work because Jaynes died while writing it in 1998. A version edited by one of his student was posthumously published (the one you can buy on Amazon). There are other gems in his bibliography and unpublished work. I never really _got_ thermodynamics until I read some of his half finished papers:

https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/node1.html https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/node2.html