No label defined (Q4526426)

This is the text of a lecture commemorating Johann Bernoulli, the former professor of the University of Groningen, who died 250 years ago (from 1998 when the lecture was given). The author announces that during the preparation to this lecture he discovered for him the well-known fact that the Bernoulli family was originally from Antwerp. In the lecture a branch of discrete mathematics is described in a popular form, namely the theory of error-correcting codes and its application to the design of the Compact Disc audio system developed by Philips Electronics and Sony. First the Hamming distance of two \(n\)-tuples \({\mathbf a}\) and \({\mathbf b}\) (words) is defined as \(d({\mathbf a},{\mathbf b}): =|\{i: a_i\neq b_i,\;1\leq i\leq n\}|\). Then the main principle of error-correcting codes is given: construct a language (called code) of words of some fixed length over a given alphabet such that any two codewords have distance at least \(2e+1\). A word that contains at most \(e\) errors is closer to the original word than to any other codeword. An algorithm is described how to correct those errors. A simple example is given connected with the bar-codes with which most products are identified nowadays. Then the compact disc problem has been discussed, where a coding scheme so-called CIRC (Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code) is used.