The History of Histograms (abridged)

The history of histograms is long and rich, full of detailed information in every step. It includes the course of histograms in different scientific fields, the successes and failures of histograms in approximating and compressing information, their adoption by industry, and solutions that have been given on a great variety of histogram-related problems. In this paper and in the same spirit of the histogram techniques themselves, we compress their entire history (including their “future history” as currently anticipated) in the given/fixed space budget, mostly recording details for the periods, events, and results with the highest (personally-biased) interest. In a limited set of experiments, the semantic distance between the compressed and the full form of the history was found relatively small!