From: "C. Hillman" <optimist@u.washington.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: Re: Are there a lot of mathematician and statistician doing information
 theory and communication?
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 14:14:23 -0800

On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, christopher wrote:

> Hi,
> Are there a lot of mathematician and statistician doing information
> theory and communication?

God yes.  See my entropy page (see url below) for a link to the
Information Theory Society of the IEEE, whose membership includes perhaps
10,000 applied mathematicians working in this field.  Shannonian
information theory is one of the most successful math theories of all
time, and this field is extremely vital fifty years after he created it.

> I get a math Bsc, MPhil in statistics. Now, I want to study PhD on
> communication and information theory stuff, although I'm not familiar
> with electronics. What problems I will face?

Not to worry; information theory is more about math (and probability
theory) than electronics.  And there's enough variety that you should be
able to find a program emphasizing the aspects which appeal most to you.
You can expect to study ergodic theory, proabability theory and maybe
algebra (groups, rings, and fields) and perhaps even dynamical systems in
addition to topics courses in coding theory and so forth.  If you like
modern algebra or number theory, algebraic coding theory should appeal to
you--- take a look at any of a half dozen modern textbooks for the flavor.
Similarly for cryptography.  For the probabilistic aspects, I'd recommend
you look at Thomas & Cover, Elements of Information Theory, and then at
some more advanced texts.  You'll also find lots of eprints (emphasizing
the dynamical systems aspects of entropy) in various places at my website.

Chris Hillman

Please DO NOT email me at optimist@u.washington.edu.  I post from this account
to fool the spambots; human correspondents should write to me at the email
address you can obtain by making the obvious deletions, transpositions,
and insertion (of @) in the url of my home page:

   http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html

Thanks!