Obituary: Edmund M. Clarke, CMU Professor Who Won Computer Science’s Nobel Prize Equivalent

McGruber writes:

Edmund M. Clarke, the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, has died of Covid-19.

Obituary: Edmund M. Clarke, CMU professor who won computer science's Nobel Prize equivalent:

Edmund M. Clarke, a professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University who won computer science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, died Tuesday of COVID-19 after a long illness. He was 75.

[...] In the early 1980s, Mr. Clarke and his Harvard University graduate student, E. Allen Emerson - as well as Joseph Sifakis of the University of Grenoble, who was working separately - developed model checking, which has helped to improve the reliability of complex computer chips, systems and networks.

For their work, the Association for Computing Machinery gave the three scientists the prestigious A.M. Turing Award - computer science's Nobel Prize - in 2007.

Mr. Clark's citation[*] on the Turing Award website[**] said Microsoft and Intel and other companies use model checking to verify designs for computer networks and software.

"It is becoming particularly important in the verification of software designed for recent generations of integrated circuits, which feature multiple processors running simultaneously," the citation page said. "Model checking has substantially improved the reliability and safety of the systems upon which modern life depends."

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