NYU Professor Amir Pnueli, 68, Distinguished
Computer Scientist
The NYU Department of Computer Science and the entire university
community mourn the sudden passing of Professor Amir Pnueli, who died on
November 2 of a brain hemorrhage. Professor Pnueli was an
internationally recognized pioneer in the area of verification, the
process of formally proving that systems, such as computer hardware and
software, behave as intended by their designers.
Professor Pnueli was the recipient of the 1996 Association for Computing
Machinery Alan M. Turing Award, the highest distinction that can be
bestowed on a computer scientist. He was also the recipient of the
Israel Prize, the state's highest honor. He was a foreign associate of
the National Academy of Engineering, a foreign member of the Academia
Europaea (Informatics section), and a member of the Israel Academy of
Sciences and Humanities. He received honorary doctorate degrees from
the University of Uppsala, Sweden, Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble,
France, and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany, as
well as numerous other professional accolades.
Amir Pnueli was born in Nahalal, Israel, on April 22, 1941. He received
a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the Technion and a Ph.D. in Applied
Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1967. After a
post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University and the IBM T.J. Watson
Research Center, he became a senior researcher at the Weizmann
Institute. In 1973, Professor Pnueli founded the Department of Computer
Science at Tel Aviv University and became its first chair. In 1981, he
returned to the Weizmann Institute as Professor of Computer Science. In
1999, he joined the Courant Institute's Department of Computer Science
at NYU, and in 2006 he was appointed to a Silver Professorship. He
supervised more than 30 Ph.D. theses during his career in Israel and New
York.
Professor Pnueli is particularly noted for introducing temporal logic, a
formal technique for specifying and reasoning about the behavior of
systems over time, to computer science. The 1996 Turing Award citation
reads,
"Amir Pnueli made a major breakthrough in the verification and
certification of concurrent and reactive systems with his landmark 1977
paper "The Temporal Logic of Programs" which was a crucial turning point
in the progress of formal methods for such systems. This paper triggered
a fundamental paradigm shift in reasoning about the dynamic behavior of
systems; the techniques it introduces have had extraordinary influence
and proved to be of lasting value. His work has been characterized as
the most important contribution to program verification in the last
twenty years and it has set the agenda for research and practice in the
area."
Professor Pnueli was an extremely prolific and deeply creative
researcher with over 250 widely-cited publications and 4 books. In
recent years, he worked on compiler and translation validation, the
verification of concurrent systems, and fairness of infinite behaviors,
as well as the application of mathematical and logical methods to the
formal specification, compositional verification, systematic
development, and automatic synthesis of reactive, real-time, discrete,
continuous, and hybrid systems.
Professor Pnueli always advocated applying theory to practice and was
instrumental in founding two Israeli software firms. His work has
influenced a wide range of scientific disciplines, including process
control, databases, biological modeling, and computer hardware design as
well as the avionics, transport and electronic hardware industries. He
shared the 2007 ACM Software System Award for Statemate, a software
engineering tool that allows developers to formally specify the
precise desired behavior of their programs. The citation for the award
reads:
"Statemate was the first commercial computer-aided software engineering
tool to successfully overcome the challenges of complex interactive,
real time computer systems, known as reactive systems. The ideas
reflected in Statemate underlie many of the most powerful and widely
used tools in software and systems engineering today."
Amir was a modest, kind, and warm person who was universally respected
as a friend, teacher, colleague and distinguished leader. He is
mourned by his colleagues and students around the world, who extend
their deepest sympathy to his wife, Ariela, his three children,
Noga, Shira, and Yishai, and his four beloved grandchildren.
|