40 YEARS OF THE LEMPEL-ZIV ALGORITHM

70 years ago, the State of Israel was born, but this wasn’t the end of Technion’s work, rather the start of a whole new challenge. Never before did the fate of a nation rest so unequivocally on the education of its young people. Israel needed infrastructure, medicine, water and energy. It needed innovators, decision-makers and entrepreneurs. For all of this, the people looked to Technion.

In 1977, Profs. Jacob Ziv and Prof. Abraham Lempel introduced the math that would enable lossless compression regardless of the structure of data and without prior knowledge of statistical properties. Many compression technologies used in memory devices, computers, and smartphones are based on this algorithm. In 2017, the achievement was honored with the EMET Prize.