The passing of Professor Abraham Lempel, a computer scientist from Israel, has been reported. Lempel made significant contributions to the field of data compression, resulting in the development of the MP3 file format and other commonly used formats like TIFF, PNG, ZIP, and GIF.

At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus at Technion research institute in Haifa, where he was recognized as one of the most important scientists in the institution’s history. With his colleague, Professor Jacob Ziv, Lempel published the Lempel-Ziv algorithm in 1977, which paved the way for lossless compression and allowed for the efficient sharing of files online.

As a result of his work, he was hired by computer company HP in 1993 and managed their Israeli branch until 2007, during which time the company registered eight patents in his name.

Professor Lempel was honored with the Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1998 and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2007 for his pioneering work in data compression.