[behnamoh]

those names were given to those algorithms by others, not the creators.

[gymbeaux]

What did they call their algorithms before they passed away?

[atiedebee]

Looking at the paper linked on the wikipedia page for Huffman Coding, David Huffman referred to Huffman Coding as just "optimum coding" [0]

[0] http://compression.ru/download/articles/huff/huffman_1952_mi...