Follow your curiosity

What discovery has been shared with you?

FACTREE gives you something interesting to discover every day — and something worth talking about together.

Start with one fact. Explore it, go deeper, then follow whichever branch catches your imagination.

Choose subjects for a surprise

Exploring any topic

Begin your discovery

Your next discovery is one click away.

Choose one or more subjects above, or leave Any Topic selected and let curiosity decide.

Mathematics

The Huffman Coding Algorithm for Data Compression

Quick fact

Huffman coding produces the most efficient prefix code possible for a given set of symbol frequencies, and it is the algorithm behind many compression tools like ZIP and GZIP. It was invented by David A. Huffman in 1952 while he was a graduate student at MIT.

Why this is interesting

Why is it that the letter 'e' appears as a short beep in Morse code, but 'z' as a long one? Could there be a mathematically perfect way to minimize the average length of such codes?