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Amir Pnueli: Ahead of His Time

[article image]
Photograph by David Harel

Remembering a legacy of practical and theoretical innovation.

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 (1)

When I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1980s,
Amir came to visit for a year.
He gave a lecture about temporal logic and I found the simplicity
of the boxes and diamonds to be appealing.
So, I sketched out a probability one proof of the Ethernet protocol
in collaboration with William Ewald (now a law professor) and brought
it to Amir.
Generously, he worked with me until the
deadline and we ended with a nice paper
that was finally published in the Principles of Programming Languages
Conference with the perhaps overwrought title:
"Temporal verification of carrier-sense local area network protocols."
Amir once said that was his first paper in distributed verification.

Amir later came to New York University,
building it into the verification powerhouse that it is.
Through all my dealings with Amir, his cheerful good nature
and straightforwardness have so nicely complemented his evident genius.
He was just a great person to know.

Dennis

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