Edwin Thompson Jaynes

Edwin Thompson Jaynes (July 5, 1922 – April 30, 1998) was Wayman Crow Distinguished Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote extensively on statistical mechanics and on foundations of probability and statistical inference, initiating in 1957 the MaxEnt interpretation of thermodynamics, as being a particular application of more general Bayesian/information theory techniques (although he argued this was already implicit in the works of Gibbs). He was one of the first to interpret probability theory as an extension of Aristotelian logic.

A particular focus of his work was the construction of logical principles for assigning prior probability distributions; see the principle of maximum entropy, the principle of transformation groups and Laplace's principle of indifference.

His last book, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science gathers various threads of modern thinking about Bayesian probability and statistical inference, and contrasts the advantages of Bayesian techniques with the results of other approaches. It was published posthumously in 2003 by Cambridge University Press from an incomplete manuscript by editor Larry Bretthorst.