Abraham Lempel, the inventor of data compression technology, died in Israel at the age of 87, writes “MIR 24” with reference to information from the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
Lempel graduated from the “Technion” Institute of Technology in Haifa, in 1967 he received a doctorate in technical sciences, and in 1977 - a professor.
Lempel, in collaboration with the Israeli mathematician Jacob Ziv, published the first version of the algorithm, LZ7, in 1977, and the second version, 79LZ, was published in 1979.
Both versions of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm became the basis for compression technologies in .tiff, .png, .zip, and .gif formats. In addition, technology has played a decisive role in the creation of the .pdf and .mp3 formats.
For his services, Abraham Lempel received the Richard Hamming Medal in 2007 “For pioneering work in the field of data compression”.
