![]() ![]() "WHEN Boltzmann first published the celebrated theorem now generally known as the $H$-theorem, he used the symbol $E$ (presumably as the first letter of entropy), not $H$. Of course, this just changes the question to "Why did Boltzmann choose the letter $H$, then?" In this letter to the editor, published in Nature in 1937, Sydney Chapman writes: $H$ is then, for example, the $H$ in Boltzmann's famous $H$ theorem." "The form of $H$ will be recognized as that of entropy as defined in certain formulations of statistical mechanics 8 where $p_i$ is the probability of a system being in cell $i$ of its phase space. Indeed, Shannon writes in his 1948 paper on page 393, after defining $H = -K \sum_^n p_i \log p_i$: Wikipedia claims, citing "Gleick 2011", that Shannon got the letter $H$ from Boltzmann's H-theorem. ![]()
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