px|image_size caption doctoral_advisor death_date death_place religion birth_place field work_institutions birth_date known_for image article_title name alma_mater
200px edwin -rrb- , photo taken circa 1960 . thompson jaynes -lrb- 1922 & ndash ; 1998 eugene wigner 30 april 1998 st. louis , missouri none . agnostic . waterloo , iowa physicist washington university 5 july 1922 maxent interpretation , bayesian theory etjaynes1.jpg edwin thompson jaynes
 e. t. jaynes princeton university
edwin thompson jaynes

edwin thompson jaynes -lrb- july 5 , 1922 -- april 30 , 1998 -rrb- was the wayman crow distinguished professor of physics at washington university in st. louis .
he wrote extensively on statistical mechanics and on foundations of probability and statistical inference , initiating in 1957 the maxent interpretation of thermodynamics , as being a particular application of more general bayesian/information theory techniques -lrb- although he argued this was already implicit in the works of gibbs -rrb- .
jaynes strongly promoted the interpretation of probability theory as an extension of logic .
in 1963 , together with fred cummings , he modeled the evolution of a two-level atom in an electromagnetic field , in a fully quantized way .
this model is known as the jaynes -- cummings model .
a particular focus of his work was the construction of logical principles for assigning prior probability distributions ; see the principle of maximum entropy , the principle of transformation groups and laplace 's principle of indifference .
jaynes ' posthumous book , `` probability theory : the logic of science '' -lrb- 2003 -rrb- gathers various threads of modern thinking about bayesian probability and statistical inference , develops the notion of probability theory as extended logic , and contrasts the advantages of bayesian techniques with the results of other approaches .
this book was published posthumously in 2003 -lrb- from an incomplete manuscript that was edited by larry bretthorst -rrb- .
an unofficial list of errata is hosted by kevin s. van horn .
