---
title: "Abraham Lempel"
chunk: 1/1
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lempel"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T17:50:01.056722+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Abraham Lempel (Hebrew: אברהם למפל; 10 February 1936 – 4 February 2023) was an Israeli computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.


== Biography ==
Lempel was born on 10 February 1936 in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). He studied at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and received a B.Sc. in 1963, an M.Sc. in 1965, and a D.Sc. in 1967. Since 1977 he held the title of full professor, and was a professor emeritus at Technion.
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), co-authored by Jacob Ziv.
Lempel was the recipient of the 1998 Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society; and the 2007 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for "pioneering work in data compression, especially the Lempel-Ziv algorithm".
Lempel founded HP Labs—Israel in 1994, and served as its director until October 2007.
Lempel died on 4 February 2023, at age 86.


== Works ==
The LZ77 and LZ78 algorithms authored by Lempel and Jacob Ziv have led to a number of derivative works, including the Lempel–Ziv–Welch algorithm, used in the GIF image format, and the Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm, used in the 7-Zip and xz compressors. The algorithms have also been used as originally published in formats such as DEFLATE, used in the PNG image format.


== Bibliography ==
Jacob Ziv, Abraham Lempel (May 1977). "A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 23 (3): 337–343. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.118.8921. doi:10.1109/TIT.1977.1055714. S2CID 9267632.


== See also ==
Timeline of algorithms
Data compression
Oblivious transfer


== References ==


== External links ==
Abraham Lempel – GHN: IEEE Global History Network
Abraham Lempel at DBLP Bibliography Server 
Technion: Computer Science Department: Prof. Abraham Lempel Archived 24 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine
"Abraham Lempel: Senior HP Fellow". Archived from the original on 6 July 2008. Retrieved 9 June 2009.
Abraham Lempel at the Mathematics Genealogy Project