Discriminants and the irreducibility of a class of polynomials in a finite field of arbitrary characteristic (Q1103005)

This is an extension of earlier work of the author [in Applied algebra, algorithmics and error-correcting codes, Proc. 2nd Int. Conf., Toulouse/France 1984, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 228, 178-181 (1986; Zbl 0593.12006)] from finite fields of characteristic 2 to arbitrary finite fields. For polynomials of the form \(f(A(x))\) with \(A(x)\) being a linearized polynomial, the discriminant and the parity of the number of irreducible factors are computed. - As an application, a new proof of a result of \textit{S. Agou} [Can. Math. Bull. 23, 207-212 (1980; Zbl 0434.12010)] for polynomials \(f(A(x))\) is given. The statement of theorem 1 suffers from the defect that the crucial quantity r is not defined. The proof of theorem 2 refers to a lemma 4, but the reader will search in vain for this lemma.