UIC Graduate Student Seminar
Friday September 14
3:00 pm
636 SEO
Speaker: Vera Pless
Title: An Introduction to Error-Correcting Codes
Abstract: Error-correcting codes are widely used to correct errors in
either the transmission or storage of information. A specific
error-correcting code provides the high fidelity on compact discs. Because
of their demonstrated practical usefulness, electrical engineers started
studying these codes about fifty years ago. Now they are studied by
engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists and a wide theory has
been developed with many connections to mathematical topics.
I will give all the basic definitions with examples and main problems in
error-correcting codes. We will discuss syndrome decoding and perfect codes.
We will then use this to determine "what color is your hat".
A description of the hat problem can be found here.