5 ms·
Interesting refresher. I do remember in college we had to build the lookup tree for some word as an exercise. Obviously the name Huffman stuck in my brain. But
by iforgotpassword 3y ago
Interesting refresher. I do remember in college we had to build the lookup tree for some word as an exercise. Obviously the name Huffman stuck in my brain. But for the love of god, I can't even remember if the lecture mentioned Fano. Seems he was just as important in the design process of what we only refer to as Huffman encoding today.
- dmurray 3y agoA nice reversal of the meme where "the supervising professor takes all the credit and the army of grad students do the real work".
- amemisoglu 3y agoThis algorithm is known as Huffman encoding.
- yccs27 3y agoYes, and it's named after graduate student Huffman (at the time) instead of after his supervisor/teacher Fano.
- bsenftner 3y agoWhich strikes me as either rare honesty, or an example of how our values have slid over time because today the professor would claim the algorithm for himself, and the student would get a B- for some spelling mistake in his write up, none the wiser the professor it making fame from their work.
- klyrs 3y agoMathematicians are familiar with the name Fano, but for Roberto's dad Gino, whose name adorns the first finite projective plane.
- thesz 3y agoHere's Shannon-Fano coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Fano_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Fano_coding It is used in PKZip Deflate algorithm. Fano's work is as famous and as useful as Huffman's.