Abraham Lempel (Hebrew: אברהם למפל; 10 February 1936 – 4 February 2023)[1] was an Israeli computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.

Lempel was born on 10 February 1936 in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine).

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;[3] and the 2007 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for "pioneering work in data compression, especially the Lempel-Ziv algorithm".

[4] Lempel founded HP Labs—Israel in 1994, and served as its director until October 2007.