In this videotaped lecture, Ronald Graham displays his characteristic panache for lucid, engaging presentations. Shedding light on a little corner of discrete mathematics, he reveals a panoply of intriguing connections to other parts of mathematics. The subject is "finite Radon transforms"--the discrete-group analog of the usual Radon transform. Investigating the problem of inverting the Radon transform leads, from one approach, to linear recurrence polynomials and elliptic curves. A second and very different approach to inversion leads into coding theory, algorithmic questions, and NP-completeness. Each approach provides different kinds of information. In addition to looking at the matter of existence of the inversion, Graham examines the thorny question of actually finding it. This lecture would be accessible to undergraduate mathematics majors and would be of interest to many at the research level as well.

Reviews

"Another wonderful lecture combining ideas from combinatorics, algebra and number theory to investigate Radon transforms."

-- Zentralblatt MATH