One of the fathers of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, Prof. em. Abraham Lempel, died on February 5, 2023 in Haifa. Abraham Lempel, born in 1936 in Lviv, then part of Poland, was a professor at the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science and developed the data compression algorithms LZ77 and LZ78 with his colleague Prof. Jacob Ziv. The abbreviations LZR, LZW, LZS, LZO, LZMA, LZX, LHA and LZH also refer to his authorship.
Without the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, the use of electronic documents such as PDF, TIFF or JPG, which are used on a daily basis, would not be possible. In particular, the transmission of high-resolution images from space made Prof. Lempel’s research possible in the first place.
The German Technion Society mourns together with the Technion family.
