David A. Huffman

David A. Huffman was an American computer scientist who, as a graduate student at MIT in 1952, devised what became known as Huffman coding, a method for building an optimal lossless data compression code from the frequency of the symbols being encoded. The technique remains a component of many later file formats and communication standards. Huffman spent much of his later career on the founding faculty of the computer science department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.