Communication theory--Exposition of fundamentals

In any branch of applied mathematics, the vague and ambiguous concepts of a physical problem are given a more refined and idealized meaning. In information theory, one of the basic notions is that of the amount of information associated with a given situation. Information here, although related to the everyday of the word, should not be confused with it. In everyday usage, information usually implies something about the semantic content of a message. For the purposes of communication theory, the meaning of a message is generally irrelevant; what is significant is the difficulty in transmitting the message from one point to another.