“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” — Richard P. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Knowing terminology is not the same as understanding. Explain the idea in plain language, identify the gaps, return to the source, and reconstruct it until you can apply it in a new context.
Below are my learning notes and teaching notes, all written as reproducible R Markdown.
From Entropy to Distributions: The Unified Logic of Exponential, Power-Law, Normal, and BoltzmannHow the maximum-entropy principle generates the exponential, power-law, normal, and Boltzmann distributions under different constraints—with the geometry of Lagrange multipliers, the counting argument, a Fourier proof of the CLT, the power-law↔exponential Gamma bridge, and physical examples. Updated 2026-08-28.