  A minimax tree is similar to a Huffman tree except that, instead of
minimizing the weighted average of the leaves' depths, it minimizes the maximum
of any leaf's weight plus its depth. Golumbic (1976) introduced minimax trees
and gave a Huffman-like, $\Oh{n \log n}$-time algorithm for building them.
Drmota and Szpankowski (2002) gave another $\Oh{n \log n}$-time algorithm,
which checks the Kraft Inequality in each step of a binary search. In this
paper we show how Drmota and Szpankowski's algorithm can be made to run in
linear time on a word RAM with (\Omega (\log n))-bit words. We also discuss how
our solution applies to problems in data compression, group testing and circuit
design.
