Key Papers in The Development of Coding Theory

This volume is a collection of reprints of original papers in coding theory, with a few short notes and comments inserted by the Editor. This volume and a complementary volume on the Shannon theory, edited by D. Slepian, were both compiled at the invitation of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Group on Information Theory under the leadersh ip of its 1972 President, T. M. Cover. These two volumes will help to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Shannon's classic paper. The responsibility for selecting which papers to include in this volume is entirely my own. It is a reflection of my own tastes and judgments. I am sure that no other Editor would have selected precisely the same set of papers, although there would certainly be some overlap. The reader who wishes to make such comparisons should also examine I. Blake's Selected Papers on Algebraic Coding Theory (Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1973). If one's primary objective is to learn the subject matter, then a volume such as this one is not a particularly good way of going about it. Hindsight often enables an author to present a clearer and more complete pict ure of a subject than can ever be obtained by reading only the original papers. If one wants to learn how to construct algebraic codes and formulate algorithms to decode them, and if he wishes to acquire an understanding of these topics as quickly as possible, then I strongly urge him to begin by studying my book, Algebraic Coding Theory (McGraw-Hiill, 1968). However, if one is more interested in a general impression about where coding theory has come from and how it has arrived in its present state, then this book is a good place to begin. Coding theory, a branch of applied mathematics, provides the essential tools and techniques to maintain the integrity of complex data while transmitting them over noisy channels. Without these techniques most communication channels would not function at an acceptable level. The far-reaching applications include radio, television, telephone, writing and reading CDs, and data transmission from space.