Abraham Lempel

Abraham Lempel ( born February 10, 1936 in Lemberg, Poland ) is a Polish -born Israeli computer scientist. He is considered one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.

He studied at the Technion in Haifa, where he received his Bachelor in 1963, his master's degree in 1965 and 1967 his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He then went as a research assistant at the University of Southern California. In 1969 he joined the research staff of the Sperry Rand Research Center, Sudbury (Massachusetts ). In 1971 he went back to the Technion, where he is a professor of computer science. Meanwhile, he had to stay in the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Its historically significant works begin with the presentation of the LZ77 algorithm in a paper titled, "A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression ", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory May 1977. This work had as co -author Jacob Ziv.

The following algorithms refer each with the letter L on Lempel:

The identifiers LZX, LHA ( LHarc ) and LZH also refer to Lempel.

His work laid the foundation for compressed graphics formats such as GIF, TIFF and JPEG.

In 1997 he received the Paris Kanellakis Award.