3 ms·
An interesting read, I will need to go through it with more care when I get home. A couple of personal interests are having studied with both David Huffman (th
by jmspring 12y ago
An interesting read, I will need to go through it with more care when I get home. A couple of personal interests are having studied with both David Huffman (though not for compression) and Glen Langdon (one of the arithmetic coding pioneers), I need to see how this article compares with my notes.
I also need to see about getting some of my old (15+ years) course notes online.
Just in those two, much history and memory lost and a hit for UC Santa Cruz's computer engineering and science departments (Huffman passed a number of years back, Glen this year after a period of retirement).
Edit - the scope of the article and the title provided...a serious disconnect in terms of breadth. But, better than nothing.
- dekhn 12y agoI took Huffman's class, 'Cybernetics', at UCSC when I was an undergrad, mainly because I thought I'd learn how to make robots. The first day it didn't take long for the lecture to turn to 7-dimensional spheres, their packing, and its applications to network routing. He was a tough bastard-- lots of multiplication of large numbers on tests, with only a table of logarithms and exponentials. He loved tricky questions on the tests- for example he taught us Karnaugh maps, mentioned the sides wrapped around, then had an example on the final with 1s in all four corners (I hadn't realized maps wrap around the corners, too). Great teacher; wonderful lecturer, hard grader. I failed the class (I was a biochem major and graduated), the only CS course I took in college. I really wish I had kept the notes from that class.