Amir Pnueli (Hebrew: אמיר פנואלי; April 22, 1941, to November 2, 2009) was an Israeli computer scientist who received the 1996 Turing Award.
Biography
Amnon Pnueli was born in Nahalal, in the British Mandate of Palestine, which is now part of Israel. He studied at Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv. He earned a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Technion in Haifa and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1967. His doctoral research focused on the topic of "Calculation of Tides in the Ocean." Later, during a time spent as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, he shifted his focus to computer science. His work in this field included studies on temporal logic and model checking, especially related to fairness properties in concurrent systems.
After returning to Israel, Pnueli worked as a researcher. He founded and became the first chair of the computer science department at Tel Aviv University. In 1981, he became a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute. From 1999 until his death, he also held a position at the Computer Science Department of New York University in New York, U.S. He also worked as an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the Joseph Fourier University.
During his career, Pnueli started two technology companies. He had three children and, at the time of his death, had four grandchildren.
Pnueli died on November 2, 2009, due to a brain hemorrhage.
Awards and honours
- In 1996, Pnueli was given the Turing Award for important work that introduced temporal logic into computing science and for major contributions to verifying programs and systems.
- On May 30, 1997, Pnueli received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
- In 1999, he was inducted as a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
- In 2000, he was awarded the Israel Prize for computer science.
- In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
- The Weizmann Institute of Science honors him with a memorial lecture series.