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This talk concerns the transmission of a message over a noisy channel which may corrupt the message. Specifically, can we encode our message into a longer message so that the original message can be recovered from the received corrupted message with little chance of error? To overcome the potential for errors, it is natural to believe the length of the encoded message must be much longer than the original message, making our rate of communication tend toward zero. The classical result in information theory, Shannon’s theorem, shows that such compromise is unnecessary: there exist constant rate codes where the probability of incorrect decoding tends to zero. We will discuss an outline of this theorem, examples of a few codes, and applications. Applications will include QR bar codes, CD and Blu-Ray Discs, deep space communications, and telecommunications. This talk is aimed towards undergraduates. Experience in linear algebra and probability are helpful but not required