Fano And Huffman

A fun historical tidbit on information theory.

In 1951, Robert M. Fano, a professor at MIT, assigned his information theory students a deceptively simple-sounding problem as a final term paper: find the most efficient way to represent numbers, letters, or symbols using binary code.

What he didn't reveal was that this was an… pic.twitter.com/xYiQP41wzc

— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) November 27, 2024

More information on Huffman's breakthrough here.