Recently I came across an interesting puzzle:

An editor of The History of the World of Science wants to find out the time when the largest number of prominent scientists were alive. The prominent scientists are, by definition, the people mentioned > in the book with the dates of their birth and death. (No living scientists are included in the book.) ? Devise an algorithm for this task if it has the book’s index as its input. The entries in the index are sorted alphabetically and give the persons’ birth and death years. If person A died the same year >person B was born, assume that the former event happened before the latter one.

After giving it a bit of thought, I implemented an interesting data structure to solve it like a basic binary search tree. Here it goes:

Here’s the tree generated for the data in scientists.rb(using graphviz):