This document discusses mean square estimation and the minimization of mean square error (MMSE) criterion for obtaining estimators. It shows that under MMSE, the best estimator for an unknown quantity Y in terms of observed data X is the conditional mean of Y given X. This minimizes the mean square error between the estimate and the true value of Y. For linear estimators, the best estimator satisfies an orthogonality principle where the error is orthogonal to the data. A similar nonlinear orthogonality rule also holds for nonlinear estimators.