Abraham Lempel

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Abraham Lempel is a computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms. Originally from Poland, Lempel is now a citizen of Israel.

His historically important works start with the presentation of the LZ77 algorithm in a paper entitled "A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression" in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (May 1977). This work was co-authored by Jacob Ziv. He has been named the recipient of the 2007 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal "For pioneering work in data compression, especially the Lempel-Ziv algorithm."

The following algorithms point with their letter L towards Lempel:

  • 1977: LZ77 (Lempel–Ziv)
  • 1978: LZ78 (Lempel–Ziv)
  • 1984: LZW (Lempel–Ziv–Welch)
  • LZR (LZ–Renau)
  • LZS (Lempel–Ziv–Stac)
  • LZO (Lempel–Ziv–Oberhumer)
  • 2001: LZMA (Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain Algorithm)

The terms LZX, LHA (LHarc) and LZH do reference Lempel as well.

His works laid the basis for such compressed graphics formats like GIF, TIFF and JPEG.

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