The weekly SILO Seminar Series is made possible through the generous support of the 3M Company and its Advanced Technology Group
with additional support from the Analytics Group of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company
Nigel Boston, Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor, Department of Mathematics
Date and Time: Jul 30, 2015 ( 4:00 PM)
Location:
Orchard room (3280) at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Building
A good code has both rate k/n and relative minimum distance d/n
large. The fundamental question of coding theory is to describe the closure
of the set of points (d/n,k/n). Goppa's conjecture says that, except for isolated
points, it's the region below the curve y=1-H(x) for x<1/2, where H is the
binary entropy function. I'll describe this and a tantalizing connection with
hyperelliptic curves that led us briefly to think we'd disproved the conjecture.
(Joint work with Jing Hao.)