> As an information theorist, I used to be able to point to optical disks as an application of my field, and be like "see all that math is useful for something," but now I don't have anything shiny to point to anymore :(
Surely there's some forward error correction built into, well, pretty much any physical media these days? I can't imagine BluRay would need less of it than a CD.
I'm sure pretty much all storage media (SSD's and such) have it, as well as internet protocols and digital media (now that having storage locally is becoming less cool)
High-bandwidth Ethernet uses forward error correction, but I'm not aware of any higher-than-physical internet protocols that do, unless you count erasure codes a la QUIC
IP, TCP, and UDP all have checksums, though (a) that's less powerful than error correction and (b) the above are weaker than the Ethernet checksum (Ethernet is 32 bits while the others are 16 bits, and also I think these three are all addition- or XOR-based instead of a polynomial CRC).
Surely there's some forward error correction built into, well, pretty much any physical media these days? I can't imagine BluRay would need less of it than a CD.