Richard Hamming

Numerical analysis is a subject of extreme interest to mathematicians and computer scientists, who will welcome this first inexpensive paperback edition of a groundbreaking classic text on the subject. In an introductory chapter on numerical methods and their relevance to computing, well-known mathematician Richard Hamming ("the Hamming code," "the Hamming distance," and "Hamming window," etc.), suggests that the purpose of computing is insight, not merely numbers. In that connection he outlines five main ideas that aim at producing meaningful numbers that will be read and used, but will also lead to greater understanding of how the choice of a particular formula or algorithm influences not only the computing but our understanding of the results obtained.

The purpose of Error-Control Coding for Data Networks is to provide an accessible and comprehensive overview of the fundamental techniques and practical applications of the error-control coding needed by students and engineers. An additional purpose of the book is to acquaint the reader with the analytical techniques used to design an error-control coding system for many new applications in data networks. Error~control coding is a field in which elegant theory was motivated by practical problems so that it often leads to important useful advances. Claude Shannon in 1948 proved the existence of error-control codes that, under suitable conditions and at rates less than channel capacity, would transmit error-free information for all practical applications. The first practical binary codes were introduced by Richard Hamming and Marcel Golay from which the drama and excitement have infused researchers and engineers in digital communication and error-control coding for more than fifty years. Nowadays, error-control codes are being used in almost all modem digital electronic systems and data networks. Not only is coding equipment being implemented to increase the energy and bandwidth efficiency of communication systems, but coding also provides innovative solutions to many related data-networking problems.

This book offers an organized and systematic approach to poset metrics and codes. Poset metrics, or metrics on a vector field determined by a partial order over a finite set, were first introduced in the mid-1990s by the mathematicians Richard A. Brualdi, Janine S. Graves and K. Mark Lawrence, and to date the relevant knowledge on this subject was spread over more than two hundred research papers. Poset metrics generalizes both the standard Hamming metric – the most important metric used in the context of coding theory – and the Niederreiter-Rosenbloom-Tsfasman metric, which is an ultrametric.

This book combines the fields of coding and information theory in a natural way. They are both theories about the representation of abstract symbols. The two fields are now each so vast that only the elements can be presented in a short book.