Terry Archer Welch was an American computer scientist. Along with

Abraham Lempel Abraham Lempel ( he, אברהם למפל, born 10 February 1936) is 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 (n ...

and

Jacob Ziv Jacob Ziv ( he, יעקב זיו; born 1931) is an Israeli electrical engineer who, along with Abraham Lempel, developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms. Biography Ziv was born in Tiberias, British mandate Palestine, on 27 ...

, he developed the

lossless Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...

Lempel–Ziv–Welch Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) is a universal lossless data compression algorithm created by Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It was published by Welch in 1984 as an improved implementation of the LZ78 algorithm published by Lempe ...

(LZW)

compression algorithm In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

, which was published in 1984.

Education

Welch received a

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

M.S. A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

degree at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

. He taught at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

and worked in

computer design In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the ...

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

Waltham, Massachusetts Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, th ...

Career

He taught at the University of Texas in Austin until joining the Sperry Research Center,

Sudbury, Massachusetts Sudbury is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. At the 2020 census, it had a population of 18,934. The town, located in Greater Boston's MetroWest region, has a rich colonial history. History Incorporated in 1639, the bou ...

, in 1976 where the paper about the LZW algorithm was published. In 1983 he joined DEC where he worked as DEC liaison to MCC's advanced computer architecture program. He died of a brain tumor in 1988.

References

American information theorists Modern cryptographers 1939 births 1988 deaths {{compu-scientist-stub