Does anyone know the real history with arithmetic encoders?
A lot of places seem to credit Rissanen, but I remember from when this was actually my field, that Elias did most of the work in the early '60s (and actually went on a tangent that Shannon considered in the '50s), and Rissanen's contribution was getting the finite word length arithmetic considerations properly done.
In fact, when I studied this at the university (early 90s), it was introduced as "Elias (aka Arithemetic) coding".
Glen Langdon, who authored early papers with Jorma Rissanen on Arithmetic Coding was my advisor. I am not sure if I still have notes on what Glen taught in his data compression classes, but I will see what I have.
I've been meaning to get notes from his classes as well as some transform mathematics notes from one of David Huffman's classes online.
A lot of places seem to credit Rissanen, but I remember from when this was actually my field, that Elias did most of the work in the early '60s (and actually went on a tangent that Shannon considered in the '50s), and Rissanen's contribution was getting the finite word length arithmetic considerations properly done.
In fact, when I studied this at the university (early 90s), it was introduced as "Elias (aka Arithemetic) coding".