scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1156677

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Publication:4390716





In my talks at the 26th Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, I discussed a number of open problems and conjectures in finite fields as they related to each of the three themes of the conference. Since many of those problems are already stated in the literature, in this short note I will not attempt to provide anything even remotely close to a comprehensive survey; instead I will briefly refer to various papers which contain much more complete accounts of many of the problems I discussed. My hope is that some of you will be sufficiently interested to pursue and hopefully solve some of these finite field problems. I will break this note into three sections; the first will discuss finite field problems with combinatorial applications. Section 2 will consider computational issues while the final section will briefly discuss several graph theory problems as they relate to finite fields. Let \(F_q\) denote the finite field of order \(q\) a prime power and let \(F_q[x]\) denote the ring of polynomials over \(F_q\). One of the fundamental properties of finite fields is that if \(f:F_q\to F_q\) is any function from \(F_q\) to itself, \(f\) can be represented by a polynomial of degree \(<q\) over \(F_q\). In fact such a polynomial \(p(x)\) can be obtained in the form \(p(x)= \sum_{a\in F_q} f(a) [1-(x-a)^{q-1}]\). We refer to \textit{R. Lidl} and \textit{H. Niederreiter} [Finite fields (1983; Zbl 0554.12010)] for a comprehensive treatment of the theory as well as a number of applications of finite fields.











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