Pnueli, Amir

Amir Pnueli, (born April 22, 1941, Nahalal, Palestine [now Israel]—died Nov. 2, 2009, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Israeli computer scientist and winner of the 1996 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for “seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and system verification.”

Pnueli received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Israel Institute of Technology and a doctorate (1967) in mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He switched to computer science as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and IBM’s Watson Research Center. Pnueli returned to Israel as a senior researcher in the department of applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute. In 1973 he moved to Tel Aviv University, where he founded the school’s department of computer science, and in 1981 he returned to the Weizmann Institute.

In 1971 Pnueli cofounded the software company Mini-Systems. When it was acquired by the Scitex Corporation in 1984, he cofounded AdCad (now i-Logix), a developer of computer-aided engineering software.

Pnueli is the author, with Zohar Manna, of The Temporal Logic of Reactive and Concurrent Systems: Specification (1991) and Temporal Verification of Reactive Systems: Safety (1995).