Newton Faller

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 UNIX development project at the Electronic Computing Center of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (NCE/UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro.

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.

Later, Robert G. Gallager (1978) and Donald Knuth (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 United States from 1976 to 1981 and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981.