Newton Faller (January 25, 1947–October 9, 1996) the son of Kurt Faller and Ada Faller from Rio Grande do Sul, was a Brazilian

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

and

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the ...

. He is credited with the discovery of adaptive Huffman codes while an employee of IBM do Brasil in Rio. He was later the head of the Brazilian

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development project at the Electronic Computing Center of the

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro or University of Brazil (UFRJ; pt, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro or ') is a public research university located in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is the largest federal university in th ...

(NCE/UFRJ),

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of the same name, Brazil's List of Brazilian states by population, third-most populous state, and the List of largest citi ...

. He started his career working with

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, studying the classical Huffman Codes and was the first to propose the "adaptive Huffman codes". This discovery became his Master's thesis and was later published in: Newton Faller, "An Adaptive System for Data Compression," Record of the 7th Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems and Computers, pp. 593–597, 1973. Later, Robert G. Gallager (1978) and

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer ...

(1985) proposed some complements and the algorithm became widely known as FGK (from the initials of each of the researchers). Later, Faller went to study in the

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from 1976 to 1981 and received a

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in Electrical Engineering and

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from the

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in 1981. He was married to Maria Ester Kremer Faller and had two daughters, Maria Clara Kremer Faller and Ana Luisa Kremer Faller. He spent his childhood in Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, and had two younger sisters: Ana Maria Faller and Angela Faller. Faller died in 1996 and today the Brazilian equivalent of the

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...

is called the " Newton Faller Award".

References

*D. A. Huffman, "A Method for the Construction of Minimum Redundancy Codes," '' Proc. IRE'', Vol. 40, No. 9, pp. 1098–1101, 1952. *Robert G. Gallager, "Variations on a Theme by Huffman," ''

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory ''IEEE Transactions on Information Theory'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the IEEE Information Theory Society. It covers information theory and the mathematics of communications. It was established in 1953 as ''IRE Tra ...

'', Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 668–674, Nov. 1978. *Donald E. Knuth, "Dynamic Huffman Coding," ''Journal of Algorithms'', Vol. 6, pp. 163–180, 1985. {{DEFAULTSORT:Faller, Newton 1947 births 1996 deaths Brazilian people of German descent Brazilian computer scientists 20th-century Brazilian engineers People associated with Federal University of Rio de Janeiro