Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Amir Pnueli (1941-2009)

Amir Pnueli passed away Monday from a brain hemorrhage. Amir was an expert in program verification who won the 1996 Turing Award primarily for his 1977 FOCS paper The Temporal Logic of Programs. Lenore Zuck shares her thoughts.






Update 11/15: NYT Obit for Pnueli


  1. Thanks to Lenore for a very well-written and heartfelt obituary.

    May I suggest that the CAV Award be named after Amir?

  2. The FOCS paper is now locked behind a paywall, even 30 years after its publication. Are there any better links?

  3. Very sad news.

    Are there any better links?

    Yes, it's in his homepage:

  4. very beautiful and moving!
    thank you Lenore!

  5. Nicely written eulogy. I interacted with Amir many times. It was always a joy to talk to him both technical and non-technical material. Whenever I talked to him, he always provided new insights into the problem. He had a broad and deep understanding of the technical issues.
    It is indeed a great loss to the CS community.

  6. Thanks, Amir! Thanks for your example and your guidance.
    Alberto Pettorossi

  7. I am shocked and saddened by the demise of Amir Pnueli, one of the stalwarts of Computer Science. I was fortunate to have listened to
    several of his brilliant and insightful speeches including his
    non-chalant banquet speech in the rocking and noisy New York Harbor
    cruiseliner during CAV 1996. My most personal interactions were during my visit to Weizmann in 2001. Amir was unimaginably gracious! He described in great detail the early history of Israel, including how the Weizac machine was built by Gerry Estrin during the formative days of Israel. Apparently Amir used that machine (now in a display case at Weizmann) for his PhD work on analyzing the oceans. Amir and Ariela
    also took me to a fancy seaside restaurant in Rehovot. All in all the Computer Science community has lost one of its finest citizens!

  8. I wished to be his student but unfortunately I could not attend his even a single lecture. During my studies at Aalborg University I studied his work on program verification.

    Waseem Mufti

  9. Sad.
    Was working for Adcad with his nephew Yachin.

  10. Thanks for his unforgetable worK.

  11. I was shocked to know this sad news from the cover story of the Communications of ACM 01/2010 issue. Pnueli was my external PhD examiner 15 years ago, I still kept his original generous comments and remembered his good words for my work. Thank you, Prof. Pnueli and may you rest in peace!