FINITE FIELDS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS, cilt.5, sa.4, ss.436-449, 1999 (SCI-Expanded)
We establish a correspondence between a class of Kummer extensions of the rational function field and configurations of hyperplanes in an affine space. Using this correspondence, we obtain explicit curves over finite fields with many rational points. Some of our examples almost attain the Oesterle bound. (C) 1999 Academic Press.