Professor Avraham Lempel died, whose algorithm became the basis for creating PDF, MP3, PNG, ZIP

Avraham Lempel, an Israeli computer scientist whose work on data compression algorithms inspired file formats such as PDF, MP3, PNG and ZIP, has died at the age of 86. The professor’s death was announced Technion (Israel Institute of Technology – University in Haifa).

Professor Abraham Lempel was born in 1936 in Poland and began his studies at the Technion in 1959. In just eight years, he received three degrees. In 1993, Mr. Lempel was hired by the IT giant HP and a year later opened his first enterprise in Israel, which he managed until 2007. During his time at HP, the company filed eight patents in his name in the United States.

Abraham Lempel became the founder of the LZ lossless data compression algorithm family or the Lempel-Ziv algorithm. In 1977, together with his colleague Professor Yaakov Ziv, he published the first version of the algorithm, LZ7. In 1979, the second version of 79LZ was published. They provided the basis for compression technologies that are still widely used today, such as TIFF, PNG, ZIP, and GIF, and played a key role in the development of the PDF and MP3 formats.