This book developed from a course on finite fields I gave at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Spring semester of 1979. The course was taught at the request of an exceptional group of graduate students (includ ing Anselm Blumer, Fred Garber, Evaggelos Geraniotis, Jim Lehnert, Wayne Stark, and Mark Wallace) who had just taken a course on coding theory from me. The theory of finite fields is the mathematical foundation of algebraic coding theory, but in coding theory courses there is never much time to give more than a "Volkswagen" treatment of them. But my 1979 students wanted a "Cadillac" treatment, and this book differs very little from the course I gave in response. Since 1979 I have used a subset of my course notes (correspond ing roughly to Chapters 1-6) as the text for my "Volkswagen" treatment of finite fields whenever I teach coding theory. There is, ironically, no coding theory anywhere in the book! If this book had a longer title it would be "Finite fields, mostly of char acteristic 2, for engineering and computer science applications. " It certainly does not pretend to cover the general theory of finite fields in the profound depth that the recent book of Lidl and Neidereitter (see the Bibliography) does.

Klappentext

The theory of finite fields is of central importance in engineering and computer science, because of its applications to error-correcting codes, cryptography, spread-spectrum communications, and digital signal processing. Though not inherently difficult, this subject is almost never taught in depth in mathematics courses, (and even when it is the emphasis is rarely on the practical aspect). Indeed, most students get a brief and superficial survey which is crammed into a course on error-correcting codes. It is the object of this text to remedy this situation by presenting a thorough introduction to the subject which is completely sound mathematically, yet emphasizes those aspects of the subject which have proved to be the most important for applications. This book is unique in several respects. Throughout, the emphasis is on fields of characteristic 2, the fields on which almost all applications are based. The importance of Euclid's algorithm is stressed early and often. Berlekamp's polynomial factoring algorithm is given a complete explanation. The book contains the first treatment of Berlekamp's 1982 bit-serial multiplication circuits, and concludes with a thorough discussion of the theory of m-sequences, which are widely used in communications systems of many kinds.

Inhalt
1 Prologue.- 2 Euclidean Domains and Euclid's Algorithm.- 3 Unique Factorization in Euclidean Domains.- 4 Building Fields from Euclidean Domains.- 5 Abstract Properties of Finite Fields.- 6 Finite Fields Exist and are Unique.- 7 Factoring Polynomials over Finite Fields.- 8 Trace, Norm, and Bit-Serial Multiplication.- 9 Linear Recurrences over Finite Fields.- 10 The Theory of m-Sequences.- 11 Crosscorrelation Properties of m-Sequences.