B. Roy Frieden

Bernard Roy Frieden (born September 10, 1936) is an American mathematical physicist. He is an emeritus professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona.

Education and career Frieden grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was part-owner of the Empire Mirror Works until the collapse of the business in 1948. After a bachelor's degree in physics from Brooklyn College, he received a master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1959.

He joined the University of Arizona faculty as an assistant professor in 1966, and remained there for the rest of his career, retiring as a professor emeritus in 2002. and was among the first to investigate the optical transfer function of a three-dimensional object. He was the first to apply Jaynes' maximum entropy principle to image restoration.

He was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, now known as Optica, in 1975; in 1988, he was elected a Fellow of SPIE.

Frieden originated Extreme Physical Information (EPI), an information-theoretic framework deriving physical laws from Fisher information. His foundational work is detailed in the books Physics from Fisher Information (1998) and Science from Fisher Information (2004). EPI has been independently applied and extended in peer-reviewed research across multiple disciplines, including thermodynamics (Plastino), evolutionary biology (Gatenby), systems science (Yolles), and quantum foundations (Regoli).