The biggest application that we can enter now is the
building of a large steel rusting nearring near our
institute. We think it's cool. It's also the reason
that I have used the "open-top" nearring symbol
for this collection of pages, since this is the largest
(3 metres plus, that's 10 feet for the imperialists)
application of nearrings I have seen (even Stuart Scott
hasn't published three metres of papers yet, though
he's probably getting close!), I respect it's
orientation. It can become one more religious war,
like left-right-ness or the existance
of hyphens!
One element that has appeared recently as an application of nearrings is the use of planar and other nearrings to develop designs and codes. In our department, Roland Eggestberger, Gerhard Wagner, Peter Fuchs, Gunter Pilz all worked on some projects in this direction. Other people who have been major movers in this direction are Jim Clay and We.F. Ke. We have a short introduction to the construction of codes from planar nearrings.