Israeli electrical engineer Jacob Ziv and computer scientist Abraham Lempel, who worked together at the Technion in Haifa, developed the LZ77 compression standard (Lempel Ziv 1977). This standard is still widely used today, from MP3 music files to ZIP-packed data piles to PNG images. Jacob Ziv was born in Tiberias, British Palestine, and worked for Bell Labs before taking up a professorship at the Technion. Abraham Lempel was born in Lviv, Poland, and made his way to Israel via Paris. After working in the Sperry Rand research labs, he joined the Technion as a professor of computer science.
The LZ compression method developed by Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel works by encoding new text parts in a way that searches for previously encoded sections to be used as headers for new code words. After the creation of the first patent-free compression process LZ77, LZ78 was created under unusual circumstances. While Ziv went to Bell Labs for another year, Lempel worked at Sperry Rand, where the refined LZ78 algorithm was implemented on a computer system. A series of misunderstandings led to Sperry Rand being able to patent the LZ78.
Despite this, Ziv and Lempel were honored with numerous awards and medals for their compression process. However, Terry Welch, born in 1939 and who puts the W in the Ziv-Lempel-Welch method, published in 1984 and also popular, was already ill when ZLW became popular. He died of a tumor in 1988 at the age of 49.
