Clifford Cocks, meet David Huffman... -- Exhibit A -- Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's

Clifford Cocks, meet David Huffman... -- Exhibit A -- Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it. -- Exhibit B -- In 1951, David A. Huffman [...] hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient. In doing so, the student outdid his professor, who had worked with information theory inventor Claude Shannon to develop a similar code. -- In other words, as we can clearly see here, it pays to be ignorant :-)