Musings about text redundancy and text compression

Abstract

I muse about some “stringological” questions: Is it possible to encode and compress any given string in such a way that all redundancy is removed? And, if this not possible: How closely could we approximate the ideal aim? My little essay is naive in the sense that I have never studied “stringology” and coding theory properly – therefore also no literature references at the end of this paper. The sole purpose of this little sketch is to entertain my colleague Derrick Kourie at the occasion of his 60th birthday, for which I wish him all the best of happiness as well as many further years to come.