Thanks to Giacomo Fenzi for helpful review and feedback.
Reed-Solomon(RS) codes are an important tool within computer science. The deep history of these codes covers over fifty years of real-world applications. In many ways, they are the fundamental building block for how data is stored and transferred in the digital era.
RS-codes remain an extremely active and rich area of research in the field of theoretic computer science. The most exciting new area of research is within the context of zero-knowledge cryptography and interactive oracle proofs(IOP). Many of the properties that make RS-codes useful for working with data, also translate to the construction of efficient proof systems.
One of these properties is the concept of proximity testing. Given a codeword $RS[\mathbb{F}, L, d]$ and a function $f:L \rightarrow \mathbb{F}$, we can determine whether $f$ is a code-word or $\delta$-close to a code-word by querying $f$ at only a few locations. Specifically, we test a proximity to a low-degree polynomial $p$ with respect to $L$:
$$\Delta(f,p) \le \delta$$