Griesmer bound

In the mathematics of coding theory, the Griesmer bound, named after James Hugo Griesmer, is a bound on the length of linear binary codes of dimension k and minimum distance d. There is also a very similar version for non-binary codes. For a binary linear code, the Griesmer bound is: Let denote the minimum length of a binary code of dimension k and distance d. Let C be such a code. We want to show that Let G be a generator matrix of C. We can always suppose that the first row of G is of the form r = (1, ..., 1, 0, ..., 0) with weight d. The matrix generates a code , which is called the residual code of obviously has dimension and length has a distance but we don't know it. Let be such that . There exists a vector such that the concatenation Then On the other hand, also since and is linear: But so this becomes . By summing this with we obtain . But so we get As is integral, we get This implies so that By induction over k we will eventually get Note that at any step the dimension decreases by 1 and the distance is halved, and we use the identity for any integer a and positive integer k. For a linear code over , the Griesmer bound becomes: The proof is similar to the binary case and so it is omitted.