>>12678739not necessarily obscure, but smaller and not as talked about:
-lambda calculus. Such a fun formulation. It feels more "pure" when it comes to talking about the essence of computation compared to turing machines.
-Principle of Maximum Entropy: If we have n options we can choose from and have no information about them, what is the best probability to assign to each? The answer is intuitive, just do 1/n; but we've seen again and again that you can't just go off intuition. Is there a probabilistic/mathematical way to answer this question without pretty much any assumptions? This was answered with the principle of maximum entropy. There's a few formulations, but it ties into information theory and the interpretation of entropy.
-Probability Theory as extended logic: E.T. Jaynes is one of my favorite never-talked-about statisticians. His book, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, is one of my favorite of all time. It's so fucking good and bridges logic and probability together, bridging entropy from information theory and statistical mechanics, and deriving probability theory from straight-up first order logic. I had a lot of fun wow moments in this book.
