Information and communication
GEORGE G. HALL · International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology · 1982
This paper describes a course given during one term within the second year of a mathematics degree programme. Although it occupies only 25 hours it makes a distinctive contribution to the education of the students because it relies on their active cooperation and because it opens up a large number of real situations to their investigation. The course is concerned with information and its communication. Simple concepts are introduced not only from information theory but also from automata theory and pattern recognition. Lectures are supplemented by class experiments, organized and controlled by the students themselves, in which some of the phenomena are demonstrated. The course is assessed by a project which each student finds for himself. Since both the course and the project are examples of communication their presentation is also part of their content. This practical experience of a self‐referencing system is important to mathematicians. Not only is this theory mathematically simple, it is also simple in its structural demands on a situation to which it is applied. The result is a very rich harvest of applications. These include all forms of language and communication and, hence, many aspects of culture and thought. Because of the close relation of information to diversity and entropy there are also applications unrelated to communication. The course proves that novel, but simple, ideas can be used confidently by students and applied by them to real situations in a creative and original way.