This is extremely well deserved.
Shannon's original paper, "A mathematical theory of communication" is very readable (especially discrete sources and channels; you need some calculus for the continuous sources and channel stuff), and yet touches on many things and has many insights. At least as late as 2000, one very-well-published prof at the uni I was attending told me that whenever he wants to break out to a new direction, he rereads it 5-10 times and realizes another thing that Shannon considered trivial and that was yet unexplored.
Also, there's basically no repeated sequences in large image data. JPEG, H264 and all their friends are all about compressible approximations that are still close enough, and which rarely if ever have repeated data.
Rather, it was what Lempel and Ziv proved about both of their simple algorithms -- The one published in 1977, usually referred to as LZ77 which is the basis of all <length,distance> variants, and the one published in 1978, usually referred to as LZ78 which is the basis of LZW, and other <word,char> variants.
They proved that for a very large class of sources (those described by markov models, context trees, among many others), these algorithms asymptotically give the best possible compression. In fact, some applications (also proved correct by Ziv) use the compressed datastream statistics to estimate source entropy, because it's much easier to implement than any direct measurement.
Both Ziv and Lempel did a lot of other things; However, Lempel did more in the area of switching systems and his other contributions are numerous and interesting, but were less profound in any specific field -- Whereas Ziv's contribution to Information Theory through the last 60 years or so has been much more profound.
The algorithm is easy, but the analysis of its effectiveness is not at all easy.
then you have monsters like this
LZ78 is incredibly simple, elegant AND easy to get your your head around. I had implemented it once in 2 lines of Python. some 25 years ago. If I can shake the rust maybe I'll be able to rederive it.
I had implemented it once in 2 lines of Python. some 25 years ago. If I can shake the rust maybe I'll be able to rederive it.
Most of modern lossless compression is instead based on the LZ77-LZSS-... linage, which has a massive number of different improvements and variations.