| Amir Pnueli- Died- Nov 2009 | |
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| Born | April 22, 1941 Nahalal, Israel |
| Died | 2 November 2009 (aged 68) New York, United States |
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Weizmann Institute New York University |
| Notable awards | Turing Award, Israel Prize |
Dr. Amir Pnueli Died in Early november from brain hemorrage.
“He was a brilliant man, but most of all, he was a very modest person, a very sweet man.” That’s how Benjamin Goldberg, an NYU associate professor of computer science, remembers Amir his colleague in the department “You would never know that he had won all of the important awards in his fields and was considered a giant”.
Pnueli was born in Nahalal, Israel and received a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the Technion in Haifa, and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. 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 have focused on temporal logic and model checking, particularly regarding fairness properties of concurrent systems.
He returned to Israel as a researcher and after a sequence of academic appointments became Professor of Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute in 1981. Since 1999, Pnueli has also held a position at the Computer Science Department of New York University, New York, U.S..
In 1971 he co-founded Mini-Systems with the Lachover brothers, which was the nucleus of the software group at Scitex and later sold in parts to Scitex. Amir is behind many of the fundomental image processing algorithms, which made Scitex what it later became.
He has left three children and four grandchildren and his wife Ariela.
