6.895 Course announcement

Prereq: 6.046 & Mathematical Maturity.
Time: MW 1:00-2:30pm
Location: 36-156
3-0-9 H-Level Grad Credit
Homepage: http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~madhu/FT04/

Essential Coding Theory

This course introduces the theory of error-correcting codes to computer scientists. This theory, dating back to the works of Shannon and Hamming from the late 40's, overflows with theorems, techniques, and notions of interest to theoretical computer scientists. The course will focus on results of asymptotic and algorithmic significance. Principal topics include:

Construction and existence results for error-correcting codes.
Limitations on the combinatorial performance of error-correcting codes.
Decoding algorithms.
Applications in computer science.

This course was offered as 6.897 in Fall 2001, and 6.896 in Fall 2002. See http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~madhu/FT01 and http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~madhu/FT02 for notes from previous offerings. Other sources include:

http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~madhu/coding/course.html : Course notes from a fast-paced version of this course
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~madhu/papers/focs01-tut.ps : A tutorial/survey.

Grading in this course will be based on four problem sets, scribe work, and possibly one term paper.

Instructor: Madhu Sudan