Reed-Solomon Codes and the Deep Hole Problem

Speaker: 

Matt Keti

Institution: 

University of California, Irvine, Department of Mathematics

Time: 

Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - 11:30am to 1:30pm

Location: 

RH 340P Ph.D. Defense

In many types of modern communication, a message is transmitted over a noisy medium. When this is done, there is a chance that the message will be corrupted. An error-correcting code adds redundant information to the message which allows the receiver to detect and correct errors accrued during the transmission. We will study the famous Reed-Solomon code (found in QR codes, compact discs, deep space probes, ...) and investigate the limits of its error-correcting capacity. It can be shown that understanding this is related to understanding the "deep hole" problem, which is a question of determining when a received message has, in a sense, incurred the worst possible corruption. We partially resolve this in its traditional context, when the code is based on the finite field F_q or F_q^*, as well as new contexts, when it is based on a subgroup of F_q^* or the image of a Dickson polynomial. This is a new and important problem that could give insight on the true error-correcting potential of the Reed-Solomon code.

Can zombie do math?

Skimming through recent book and movie titles, one might imagine that we are headed for a zombie apocalypse. Many have written about what this would entail for our civilization, for our culture, and even for our consumerist tendencies. In this talk we will look at yet another facet of this phenomenon: What would happen to our mathematics? Guided by the history and the philosophy of mathematics, we will pose and search for answers to fundamental questions about the nature of mathematics and how it relates to our humanity.

The Probabilistic Method

Probability theory is a large field in mathematics that, at its core, deals with formulating "uncertainty". Its modern applications range from statistics to economics, from computational biology to finance. But did you know that there are a lot of math questions that seemingly do not involve any probability at all, but a small introduction of uncertainty gives beautiful solutions? This method, known as the probabilistic method, was pioneered by Paul Erdos and is now widely used in many areas of modern mathematics.

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