A careful historical and exegetical study of the Beast of Revelation as found in the Book of Revelation. It identifies the Beast as the Roman emperor Nero Caesar, the first persecutor of the Christian church in AD 64. The book also delves into the question of the date of the writing of Revelation, arguing that it was written by John the Apostle around AD 65 or 66.

One of the most remarkable and beautiful theorems in coding theory is Gleason's 1970 theorem about the weight enumerators of self-dual codes and their connections with invariant theory, which has inspired hundreds of papers about generalizations and applications of this theorem to different types of codes. This self-contained book develops a new theory which is powerful enough to include all the earlier generalizations.