The Statistical Foundations of Entropy

Dear Colleagues,

During the last two decades, the understanding of complex dynamical systems undergone important conceptual shifts. The catalyst was the infusion of new ideas from the theory of critical phenomena (scaling laws, renormalization group, etc.), (multi)fractals and trees, random matrix theory, network theory, and non-Shannonian information theory. On the other hand, the usual Boltzmann–Gibbs statistics have proven to be grossly inadequate in this context. While successful in describing stationary systems characterized by ergodicity or metric transitivity, Boltzmann–Gibbs statistics fail to reproduce complex statistical behavior of many real-world systems in biology, astrophysics, geology, and the economic and social sciences.

The aim of this Special Issue is to encourage researchers to present an original piece of work that could contribute to an ongoing discussion on statistical foundations of entropy with a particular emphasis on non-conventional entropies that go significantly beyond Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Shannon paradigms. Expected contributions should address, on the one-hand, purely conceptual issues ranging from non-equilibrium statistical physics, (quantum) thermodynamics to information and estimation theory, and on the other hand, they should be related to applications, e.g., in complex dynamical systems, micromechanics, networks structures, or stochastic thermodynamics.

Dr. Petr Jizba
Dr. Jan Korbel
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.