Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. 144 Unit 1 Computing Fundamentals Extensions are hidden Extensions are shown Goodheart-Willcox Publisher Figure 4-9. File name extensions are hidden by default, but can be displayed. David A. Huffman, a computer scientist and inventor, was an early pioneer in the development of computers. He won many awards. However, the one he earned in 1998 from the IEEE Information Theory Society made a big impact on data compression technologies. This award recognized his invention of the Huffman minimum-length lossless data-compression code. The compression code was the topic of a term paper he wrote while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1952. Before his method was used, file compression tended to lose some or much of the fidelity of the original file. Huffman’s idea defined a compression scheme whereby none of the data were lost. Decompression restored the file to its original fidelity. This data compression method has since been used to compress image files as well as the data stream for high-definition television (HDTV) broadcasts. The technology is also used in fax machines and modems. The compression method is known as Huffman encoding. Huffman was also very interested in origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. He contributed to the branch of mathematics involved in the paper folding techniques. Titans of Technology