Libpolycomp compresses and decompresses one-dimensional streams of numbers by means of several algorithms. It is well-suited for time-ordered data acquired by astronomical instruments or simulations. One of the algorithms, called "polynomial compression", combines two widely-used ideas (namely, polynomial approximation and filtering of Fourier series) to achieve substantial compression ratios for datasets characterized by smoothness and lack of noise. Notable examples are the ephemerides of astronomical objects and the pointing information of astronomical telescopes. Other algorithms implemented in this C library are well known and already widely used, e.g., RLE, quantization, deflate (via libz) and Burrows-Wheeler transform (via libbzip2). Libpolycomp can compress the timelines acquired by the Planck/LFI instrument with an overall compression ratio of ~9, while other widely known programs (gzip, bzip2) reach compression ratios less than 1.5.