Oliver Pretzel

A memoir on the rise of Nazism in Germany and the lives of ordinary German citizens between the two world wars finds the author witnessing such developments as the rise of the First Free Corps, the Hitler Youth movement and Stresemann years, and Hitler's coming to power. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The geometry of curves has fascinated mathematicians for 2500 years, and the theory has become highly abstract. Recently links have been made with the subject of error correction, leading to the creation of geometric Goppa codes, a new and important area of coding theory. This book is an updated and extended version of the last part of the successful book Error-Correcting Codes and Finite Fields. It provides an elementary introduction to Goppa codes, and includes many examples, calculations, and applications. The book is in two parts with an emphasis on motivation, and applications of the theory take precedence over proofs of theorems. The formal theory is, however, provided in the second part of the book, and several of the concepts and proofs have been simplified without sacrificing rigour.