Amir Pnueli

Amir Pnueli was born in Nahalal, in the British Mandate of Palestine (now in Israel). He attended Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv.^[1] He received a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Technion in Haifa, and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science (1967).^[2] His thesis was on the topic of "Calculation of Tides in the Ocean". He switched to computer science during a stint as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. His works in computer science focused on temporal logic and model checking, particularly regarding fairness properties of concurrent systems.^[3]

He returned to Israel as a researcher; he was the founder and first chair of the computer science department at Tel Aviv University. He became a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute in 1981. From 1999 until his death, Pnueli also held a position at the Computer Science Department of New York University, New York, U.S.^[3] He's also served as an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the Joseph Fourier University.^[4]

Pnueli also founded two startup technology companies during his career. He had three children and, at his death, had four grandchildren.^[3]

Pnueli died on November 2, 2009, of a brain hemorrhage.^[3][5][6]

• In 1996, Pnueli received the Turing Award for seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification.
• On May 30, 1997, Pnueli received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden.^[7]
• 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.^[8][9]
• In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
• The Weizmann Institute of Science presents a memorial lecture series in his honour.^[10]

• List of Israel Prize recipients