I come from a different math background, and it always surprises me people don't explain erasure encodings in terms of polynomials.
We all know that a polynomial of degree n is basically defined by n points. So a line is defined by 2 points.
If I need to encode the 2 pieces of info [a,b] I can just generate a polynomial ax+b and sample it at 2 points to recover the info. If I sample it at 3 points I can lose any one point and still recover [a,b]. The concept generalizes
to higher dimensions and discrete values.
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I come from a different math background, and it always surprises me people don't explain erasure encodings in terms of polynomials.
We all know that a polynomial of degree n is basically defined by n points. So a line is defined by 2 points.
If I need to encode the 2 pieces of info [a,b] I can just generate a polynomial ax+b and sample it at 2 points to recover the info. If I sample it at 3 points I can lose any one point and still recover [a,b]. The concept generalizes to higher dimensions and discrete values.
afaik that's basically it.