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David Harel - Amir Pnueli: A Gentle Giant, Lord of the Phi's and the Psi's

1,910 views · Published 26 August 2010 · 28:50 · Indexed 25 September 2026

Channel: The University of Edinburgh · 2010 · Education

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This talk, by Prof. David Harel, presents a highly personal view of Amir as a great scientist, a wonderful friend and an amazingly rare and modest intellectual and person.

Besides several anecdotes, photos, and quotes, the lecture ends with a short recorded segment showing Amir lecturing in his usual self-deprecating and most generous style.

Recorded at the 2010 The Federated Logic Conference (FLoC), hosted by the University of Edinburgh.

David Harel has been at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980. He was Department Head from 1989 to 1995, and was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science between 1998 and 2004. He was also co-founder of I-Logix, Inc.

He received his PhD from MIT in 1978, and has spent time at IBM Yorktown Heights, and sabbaticals at Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, and the University of Edinburgh.

In the past he worked mainly in theoretical computer science (logic, computability, automata, database theory), and he now works mainly on software and systems engineering and on modeling biological systems.

He is the inventor of statecharts and co-inventor of live sequence charts, and co-designed Statemate, Rhapsody and the Play-Engine. Among his awards are the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1992), the Israel Prize (2004), the ACM Software System Award (2007), and three honorary degrees.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE and the AAAS, and was elected to the Academia Europaea.

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