Surprisal analysis was formulated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a joint effort between Raphael David Levine, Richard Barry Bernstein and Avinoam Ben-Shaul in 1972. Levine and colleagues had recognized a need to better understand the dynamics of non-equilibrium systems, particularly of small systems, that are not seemingly applicable to thermodynamic reasoning. Alhassid and Levine first applied surprisal analysis in nuclear physics, to characterize the distribution of products in heavy ion reactions. Since its formulation, surprisal analysis has become a critical tool for the analysis of reaction dynamics and is an official IUPAC term. *