Astro Lunch

Data Science and Information Geometry from the Big Bang to the French Revolution

Stars and galaxies live in spacetime, a four dimensional Riemannian geometry described by things like the metric and the metric connection. Our knowledge of these things, by contrast, lives in probability space whose geometric properties are radically different. I’ll introduce some basic features of this world, such as an asymmetric metric defined by Kullback-Leilber divergence, with intuitive examples. And I’ll show how these quantities, applied to newly-digitized archives, give us unusual perspectives on human history: from the development of cultural and progress of science to one of the defining events of modern Europe: the French Revolution.