Abstract :
This paper is little more than a rehash of well-known results, mostly from the paper of Bartee and Schneider (Information and Control, vol. 6, pp. 79-98, 1963) and from Elspas (IRE Trans. Circuit Theory, vol. CT-6, pp. 45-60, 1959). The former is not even referenced. Standard algebraic theorems, notably the Cayley-Hamilton theorem, and well-known results on companion matrices are (unnecessarily) demonstrated when a reference to, e. g., Birkhoff-Mac-Lane would have sufficed. Fig. 2 of this paper is identical to a figure on page 117 of W. W. Peterson, Error Correcting Codes (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, and New York: Wiley, 1961). One wonders why this paper was written at all, and what kind of review procedure it did (or did not) receive.