Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon published the maths in 1960, and it now protects CDs, QR codes and deep space links. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

Is this really a technology fact?

Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

What else can I read about it?

The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

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Reed-Solomon codes keep scratched discs playable

Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon published the maths in 1960, and it now protects CDs, QR codes and deep space links The scheme treats a block of data as the values of a polynomial and adds check symbols, so a decoder can recover the original even when several symbols are wrong or missing. A compact disc stores its audio in two interleaved layers of this coding, which hides scratches and dust. Voyager and later probes used the same family of codes to send pictures across billions of kilometres. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Britannica

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Tags: error-correction, coding-theory, optical-discs

Reed-Solomon codes keep scratched discs playable: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon published the maths in 1960, and it now protects CDs, QR codes and deep space links. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.