Two piles of sand were poured into one, and the overall disorder didn’t exceed the sum of the parts’ disorders. That’s the strict subadditivity of entropy. Mathematicians have just proven that all concave functions behave this way, meaning almost all known types of entropy do too. This rigorous approach paves the way for new regularities in physics and computer science.
🎯 Entropy was born in the 19th century out of attempts to improve steam engines, and later snuck into computer science as a measure of a message’s surprise.
🎬 In Isaac Asimov’s story “The Last Question,” entropy threatens the very existence of the Universe—and only a supercomputer manages to reverse it.