Amir Pnueli

Amir Pnueli ( born April 22, 1941 in Nahallal, Palestine, † November 2, 2009 in New York City, New York) was an Israeli computer scientist pioneering contributions to the introduction of temporal logic in the computer science as well as the verification of programs and systems has done, and has been awarded for the 1996 Turing Award.

Pnueli received a bachelor's in mathematics at the Technion in Haifa, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

During his post-doctoral phase at Stanford University and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, he joined the computer science. Back in Israel, he worked first in the Weizmann Institute in the research, then went to the University of Tel Aviv, where he founded the Department of computer science, whose first president he was. In 1981 he was a professor of computer science back to the Weizmann Institute. Since 1999 he has taught at New York University.

1971 Pnueli was involved in the founding of the software manufacturer Mini -Systems, 1984, he founded with his two mini- system partners and David Harel, the company AdCad (later I-Logix, now part of Telelogic ), where he worked with Harel the Statemate model checker designed. He also worked with Harel on the semantics and implementation of the state transition diagrams.

1977 achieved Pnueli with his paper, The Temporal Logic of Programs a major breakthrough in the verification of parallel and reactive (?) Systems. He solved with the techniques he introduced a paradigm shift in the study of the dynamic behavior of systems from. Pnueli examined for the first time the running behavior of programs instead of only their input / output behavior, and thus introduced a powerful formalism for the analysis of programs. This continues to characterize the study of parallel programs.

In 1997 he was awarded by the University of Uppsala an honorary doctorate in 1998 from the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble and November 2000 by the Carl-von- Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. In 2007 he became a Fellow of the ACM.

Pnueli died on 2 November 2009 of a cerebral hemorrhage.