c ○ Copyright by

The reliable transmission of information bearing signals over a noisy communication channel is at the heart of what we call communication. Information theory—founded by Claude E. Shannon in 1948—provides a mathematical framework for the theory of communication; it describes the fundamental limits to how efficiently one can encode information and still be able to recover it with negligible loss. This course will examine the basic concepts of this theory. What follows is a tentative list of topics to be covered. 1. Volume I: (a) Fundamentals of source coding (data compression): Discrete memoryles