Thomas G. Szymanski

Thomas G. Szymanski is a computer scientist who, with James A. Storer, created the Lempel-Ziv-Storer-Szymanski compression algorithm, known as LZSS, in 1982. The two described the method in the article Data compression via textual substitution, published in the Journal of the ACM in 1982 on pages 928 to 951. LZSS is a lossless dictionary coding technique derived from the earlier LZ77 algorithm. Its main refinement is that a reference to earlier data is left out when it would be no shorter than the literal text it replaces, and it uses one-bit flags to tell whether the next item is a literal byte or an offset and length pair. Archivers such as ARJ, RAR, ZOO and LHarc use LZSS as their primary compression algorithm, so this single paper shaped much everyday compression software. This entry records only what that source states about his work.