In a 1971 workshop on coding theory, Ned Weldon famously stated that:

"Too many equations had been generated with too few consequences... Coding theorist professors had begotten more coding theory Ph.D.'s in their own image... no one else cared; it was time to see this perversion for what it was. Give up this fantasy and take up a useful occupation... Coding is dead."

The 1990s witnessed a major renaissance of coding theory with the discovery (and in some cases rediscovery) of codes defined on graphs, which play a central role in modern communication systems. Even newer forms of coding were conceived in the 2000s, including polar codes, the first type to provably achieve capacity.