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( Negentropy)
The negentropy, also negative entropy or syntropy, of a living system is the entropy that it exports to keep its own entropy low; it lies at the intersection of entropy and life. The concept and phrase "negative entropy" were introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1943 popular-science book What is life?[1] Later, Léon Brillouin shortened the phrase to negentropy,[2][3] to express it in a more "positive" way a living system imports negentropy and stores it.[4] In 1974, Albert Szent-Györgyi proposed replacing the term negentropy with syntropy. That term may have originated in the 1940s with the Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappiè, who tried to construct a unified theory of biology and physics. (This attempt has not gained renown or borne great fruit.) Buckminster Fuller tried to popularize this usage, but negentropy remains common. In a note to What is Life? Schrödinger explained his use of this phrase. In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality.[5][6][7] Consider a signal with a certain distribution. If the signal is Gaussian, the signal is said to have a normal distribution. Negentropy is always nonnegative, is invariant by any linear invertible change of coordinates, and vanishes iff the signal is Gaussian. Negentropy is defined as
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