Coding theory and algebraic geometry : proceedings of the international workshop, held in Luminy, France, June 17 - 21, 1991. Lecture notes in mathematics ; Vol. 1518

About ten years ago, V.D. Goppa found a surprising connection between the theory of algebraic curves over a finite field and error-correcting codes. The aim of the meeting "Algebraic Geometry and Coding Theory" was to give a survey on the present state of research in this field and related topics. The proceedings contain research papers on several aspects of the theory, among them: Codes constructed from special curves and from higher-dimensional varieties, Decoding of algebraic geometric codes, Trace codes, Exponen- tial sums, Fast multiplication in finite fields, Asymptotic number of points on algebraic curves, Sphere packings.