A Contribution To The Nonexistence Of Perfect Codes

The last few years have witnessed rapid advancements in information and coding theory research and applications. This book provides a comprehensive guide to selected topics, both ongoing and emerging, in information and coding theory. Consisting of contributions from well-known and high-profile researchers in their respective specialties, topics that are covered include source coding; channel capacity; linear complexity; code construction, existence and analysis; bounds on codes and designs; space-time coding; LDPC codes; and codes and cryptography.All of the chapters are integrated in a manner that renders the book as a supplementary reference volume or textbook for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses on information and coding theory. As such, it will be a valuable text for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels as well as instructors, researchers, engineers, and practitioners in these fields.Supporting Powerpoint Slides are available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text.

In this monograph, we develop the theory of one of the most fascinating topics in coding theory, namely, perfect codes and related structures. Perfect codes are considered to be the most beautiful structure in coding theory, at least from the mathematical side. These codes are the largest ones with their given parameters. The book develops the theory of these codes in various metrics — Hamming, Johnson, Lee, Grassmann, as well as in other spaces and metrics. It also covers other related structures such as diameter perfect codes, quasi-perfect codes, mixed codes, tilings, combinatorial designs, and more. The goal is to give the aspects of all these codes, to derive bounds on their sizes, and present various constructions for these codes.The intention is to offer a different perspective for the area of perfect codes. For example, in many chapters there is a section devoted to diameter perfect codes. In these codes, anticodes are used instead of balls and these anticodes are related to intersecting families, an area that is part of extremal combinatorics. This is one example that shows how we direct our exposition in this book to both researchers in coding theory and mathematicians interested in combinatorics and extremal combinatorics. New perspectives for MDS codes, different from the classic ones, which lead to new directions of research on these codes are another example of how this book may appeal to both researchers in coding theory and mathematicians.The book can also be used as a textbook, either on basic course in combinatorial coding theory, or as an advance course in combinatorial coding theory.

This volume contains 11 invited lectures and 42 communications presented at the 13th Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, MFCS '88, held at Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, August 29 - September 2, 1988. Most of the papers present material from the following four fields: - complexity theory, in particular structural complexity, - concurrency and parellelism, - formal language theory, - semantics. Other areas treated in the proceedings include functional programming, inductive syntactical synthesis, unification algorithms, relational databases and incremental attribute evaluation.

The problems of constructing covering codes and of estimating their parameters are the main concern of this book. It provides a unified account of the most recent theory of covering codes and shows how a number of mathematical and engineering issues are related to covering problems. Scientists involved in discrete mathematics, combinatorics, computer science, information theory, geometry, algebra or number theory will find the book of particular significance. It is designed both as an introductory textbook for the beginner and as a reference book for the expert mathematician and engineer. A number of unsolved problems suitable for research projects are also discussed.

Algebraic coding theory is a new and rapidly developing subject, popular for its many practical applications and for its fascinatingly rich mathematical structure. This book provides an elementary yet rigorous introduction to the theory of error-correcting codes. Based on courses given by the author over several years to advanced undergraduates and first-year graduated students, this guide includes a large number of exercises, all with solutions, making the book highly suitable for individual study.

This collection of contributions is offered to Jack van Lint on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday and appears simultaneously in the series Topics in Discrete Mathematics and as a special double volume of Discrete Mathematics (Volumes 106/107). It is hoped that the papers selected, all written by experts in their own fields, represent the many interesting areas that together constitute the discipline of Discrete Mathematics. It is in this sphere that van Lint has become the acknowledged master and this expansive volume serves to demonstrate the enormous significance he has had on the development of Discrete Mathematics during the last 30 years.