Transmitting and gaining data. Rudolf Ahlswede's lectures on information theory. Vol. 2. Edited by Alexander Ahlswede, Ingo Althöfer, Christian Deppe and Ulrich Tamm (Q476423)

This is the second volume of Prof. Rudolf Ahlswede's lectures in information theory (following the first 1000 pages of the preceding volume, see the review in Zbl 1293.94001) in which emphasis is put on gaining knowledge, storage, transmission and hiding data, which require the calculation of channel capacities. It comprises eight chapters (distributed in two parts which are ``transmitting data'' and ``gaining data respectively'') which are more of less self-containing. The main topics which are dealt with are the following ones. One first describes various typical special channels and then one describes various algorithms for computing channel capacities and rate-distortion functions, and this is the core of the book. Then successively one considers the Shannon model for continuous transmission, sliding-block codes, lambda-capacities and information stability, channels with infinite alphabets, information theory and mathematical statistics, and beta-biased estimators in data compression in an approach based on Krichevsky's results. This is truly a nice textbook for library, and it can be partly used for graduate courses.