143-Year-Old Problem Still Has Mathematicians Guessing – this is a NYTimes article on the Reimann hypothesis. Fun math stuff, speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to write something on PAR parity archives, which have gained popularity in binary newsgroups, and which Andy brought up during dinner last week. A unique PAR file generated for a set can replace any missing archive file. (A PAR file is the same size as one of the files in the archive set)
The PAR format isn’t actual straight parity, but builds on that same sorta idea using some higher level math (linear algebra). Some explanations are here in this message thread. I never actually took any linear algebra (switched to Fine Arts after Calculus III but before taking the LA class), but my interest was piqued, so here’s a list of related links:
- Introduction to Finite Fields
- The Math Forum – Math Library – Linear Algebra
- The Mathematical Atlas – 15: Linear and multilinear algebra; matrix theory (finite and infinite)
- The Error Correcting Codes (ECC) Page
- Reed-Solomon Codes and CD Encoding
- The Ubiquitous Reed-Solomon Codes
- Google Directory > Science > Math Applications > Communication Theory > Coding Theory
- Google Directory – Science > Math > Algebra > Linear Algebra
- Notes on Linear Algebra (postscript files)
- Finite field linear algebra subroutines
- Solving Large Sparse Linear Systems Over Finite Fields – Introduction
- Reed-Solomon coding and decoding by Phil Karn
- Error Correction Techniques
for Solid State Disk
- An introduction to Reed-Solomon codes: principles, architecture and implementation
- Computation of Discrete Logarithms in Prime Fields – Linear Algebra
- Error-correcting codes, finite fields, algebraic curves