Kirjahaku

Where there is a will, there is a way. The author provides support for this saying by his experience. Based on talent and through hard work, as a peasant boy, he passed examinations and was admitted to Peking University as an undergraduate student in 1964, and to Beijing Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences as a graduate student in 1978. Being awarded a scholarship in 1980, he went to the University of Sydney, Australia to carry out his studies for a Ph.D. degree. Upon completion of his studies in 1986, he returned to Beijing and worked there. In pursuing freedom, he went to the United States of America in 1991, and immigrated to Canada in 1994. The author has come a long way. It was a very difficult way. Using plain language, in this book the author tells his moving story, and vividly reproduces many events of those years, including the periods of the "Cultural Revolution" and 1989 pro-democracy movement in China..

Forty years ago, in 1957, the Principle of Maximum Entropy was first intro­ duced by Jaynes into the field of statistical mechanics. Since that seminal publication, this principle has been adopted in many areas of science and technology beyond its initial application. It is now found in spectral analysis, image restoration and a number of branches ofmathematics and physics, and has become better known as the Maximum Entropy Method (MEM). Today MEM is a powerful means to deal with ill-posed problems, and much research work is devoted to it. My own research in the area ofMEM started in 1980, when I was a grad­ uate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia. This research work was the basis of my Ph.D. the­ sis, The Maximum Entropy Method and Its Application in Radio Astronomy, completed in 1985. As well as continuing my research in MEM after graduation, I taught a course of the same name at the Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijingfrom 1987to 1990. Delivering the course was theimpetus for developing a structured approach to the understanding of MEM and writing hundreds of pages of lecture notes.