Madhu Sudan, Reliable Meaningful Communication

Around 1940, engineers working on communication systems encountered a new challenge: How can one preserve the integrity of digital data, where minor errors in transmission can have catastrophic effects? The resulting theories of information (Shannon 1948) and error-correcting codes (Hamming 1950) created a “marriage made in heaven” between mathematics and its applications. On the one hand emerged a profound theory that could measure information and preserve it under a variety of errors; and on the other hand the practical consequences propelled telephony, satellite communication, digital hardware and the internet. In this talk I will give a brief introduction to the history of the mathematical theory of communication and then describe some of my work in this area that focus on efficient algorithms that can deal with large amounts of error, and on communication when sender and receiver are uncertain about each other’s context.</p>