Best known for his legendary Huffman code, a compression scheme for lossless variable length encoding, Huffman joined the faculty at MIT in 1953. He was awarded the Louis E. Levy Medal in 1955. In 1967, he went to the University of California, Santa Cruz as the founding faculty member of the Computer Science Department. Huffman played a major role in the development of the department's academic programs and the hiring of its faculty, and served as chair from 1970 to 1973. He retired in 1994, but remained active as an emeritus professor, teaching information theory and signal analysis courses.
Huffman made important contributions in many other areas, including information theory and coding, signal designs for radar and communications applications, and design procedures for asynchronous logical circuits. As an outgrowth of his work on the mathematical properties of "zero curvature Gaussian" surfaces, he developed his own techniques for folding paper into unusual sculptured shapes, which gave rise to the field of computational origami.
