The Maximum-Entropy Principle was first stated explicitly in 1957 and has since been applied with varying degrees of success in a very wide range of fields. This is the first comprehensive book about the Maximum Entropy Principle and its applications to some of these fields, including statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, business, economics, insurance, finance, contingency tables, characterisation of probability distributions, statistical inference, non-linear spectral analysis of time series, pattern recognition, marketing and elections, operations research and reliability theory, image processing, computerised tomography, biology and medicine. Based on the principles that any subject can be learnt only by doing it and not just by reading about it, over six hundred specially-constructed exercises have been given throughout the book.