People

Chaim Leib Pekeris was born in Alytus A, Lithuania on June 15, 1908. His father, Samuel, owned and operated a bakery. His mother, Haaya (née Rievel) was an intellectual lady and propelled Pekeris to excel. The family home was located at 4 Murkiness Street, near the corner with Ozapavitz Street. His older brother died at birth, a very sad event that led his parents to select the name Chaim, meaning Life in Hebrew, for their second son. They added Leib, meaning Life in Yiddish, for good measure. He was followed by four siblings, Rashka (Rachael), Jacob, Zavkeh (Arthur) and Typkeh (Toyah). The family name, Pekeris, is derived from the earlier name, Peker. Lithuanian authorities required the suffix, -as or –is, be added to the original name.

At a very early age Chaim exhibited his brilliance. By the age of 16 he was teaching mathematics at his high school and coaching 14-year old boys how to prepare for the Bar Mitzvah. He was strongly encouraged to become a Talmudic scholar and a Rabbi but both he and his parents refused. By great good fortune one of Chaim’s uncles, Max Baker, had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States and had settled in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was successful in the furniture business and was able to help Chaim and his two brothers to come to the United States for their continuing education. In addition, the prominent New England merchant and philanthropist, Edward Max Chase, came to the assistance of the Pekeris brothers. He, too, was an immigrant from Lithuania. He provided the young men with immigration affidavits, helped them find employment and paid some of the tuition expenses.
The two brothers, and Chaim, too, became US citizens. Jacob, the older of the two younger brothers, became a teacher and spent the rest of his life in New England. He died at the young age of 31. Arthur became a specialist in agricultural products and settled in Denver, Colorado. Rachael, the older of the two sisters, became a Zionist and went to Israel (then Palestine) in 1935. Toyah, the younger of the two sisters was murdered by anti-semitic townspeople in Alytus A, as were the parents, during the Holocaust. Furthermore, the family home was destroyed sometime in World War II (WWII).
Pekeris, as he was called by all but his most intimate friends, entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1925. At first he majored in mathematics but changed to meteorology and graduated with the BSc degree in 1929. At that time meteorology was just being established at MIT and was a program administered within the Department of Aeronautical Engineering in the School of Engineering. Pekeris stayed at MIT for his graduate studies and became a student of Carl-Gustav Rossby. He graduated with his doctoral degree in 1933. It was the custom at MIT before WWII that doctoral graduates in the School of Science received the PhD degree and those in the School of Engineering received the ScD degree; thus, Pekeris received his ScD. The title of his ScD thesis is: The Development and Present Status of the Theory of the Heat Balance in the Atmosphere. It was not published but it was circulated in the form of informal class notes (MIT Meteorology Course No. 5, 1932).  Read more (Pdf version)

• Bibliography of C. L. Pekeris

• The First Chaim Leib Pekeris Memorial Lecture: 
  Sir James Lighthill, Ocean Tides from Newton to Pekeris, Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1995. (c)
  The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The Weizac

The history

This is a birth of the State of Israel story, and with it, the birth of the computer, and computer technology. It sounds more like a fairy tale or at the very least, a stretch of the imagination. But when you think about it, this country ­ and this Institute ­ are based on an almost embarrassing wealth of the latter.

It all began just after the War of Independence. The country was literally being built beneath the feet of a country lacking in just about everything. Israel needed housing. It needed roads and an infrastructure. It also needed to absorb a flood of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. What it lacked in the material it made up for in a vision, the Zionist vision.
At the helm was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the first President of the State and forward-thinking head of the Weizmann Institute. Fortunately, his personal Zionist drive was inclusive of the sciences. While Israel was struggling to establish something as basic as food production, Weizmann had the foresight ­ some would say audacity ­ to engage $50,000, or one-fifth of the Institute's budget, to build a computer. Why the urgency? To unravel the mysteries of theoretical physics, of course.
First imperative: Bring together the world's most brilliant Jewish minds to design the computer. Second: Find the parts to build it. Third: Be patient, because it's going to take a long, long time.
"Today, people talk about a computer for every child in the classroom," says Gerald Estrin, one of those brilliant minds. A former head of the Computer Science Department at UCLA, Estrin (Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, University of Wisconsin), was in Israel for a conference on the subject. "Say 'computer' and people think of Bill Gates. Things were different then." Indeed.

The story begins at Princeton University in the mid-1940s. The Applied Mathematics Department included Albert Einstein and other leading physicists of that era. Among them were two famed professors. One was John von Neumann, considered by many as the inventor and builder of the first electronic computer as we know it today. The other was Chaim Pekeris, a Lithuanian Jew, whose domain was computational methods for solving physical problems, and who was one of the first serious users of computers for scientific calculations.
In case you ever wondered what Einstein thought about computers, the answer is: not much. Einstein raised a skeptical brow; computers were in their experimental stage and very expensive, he argued. In the end, Einstein, who also sat on the advisory committee of the Institute, was finally persuaded to give a seal of approval to Pekeris' bold proposal to build an electronic computer at the Weizmann Institute, akin to the von Neumann machine.

In 1945, Pekeris (Ph.D., Theoretical Geophysics, MIT), was asked by the Weizmann Institute to establish a Department of Applied Mathematics. Pekeris' one condition: the building of a computer at the Institute, similar to the one he'd worked on at Princeton. Pekeris approached two colleagues from Princeton, Estrin and Ephraim Frei, an Israeli physicist. Would they be willing to join the group in Israel?
Estrin and his wife, Thelma, also an electrical engineer, came on board, literally. They arrived on a ship carrying immigrants from North Africa. Their daughter Judy, born at the Institute, is now a famous executive in the computer industry.
Estrin recalls that after meeting with leading Israeli scientists at Weizmann, "My impression was that except for Pekeris, they thought it ridiculous to build a computer in Israel. And we soon learned that I was not to 'help' the project but, rather, to take charge and be its director."
And where do you put the director of an important project that will later revolutionize the world? In three rooms of the basement of the Ziskind Building.

Pekeris was joined by Micha Kedem, an Israeli electrical engineer (who later joined IBM Israel). Together they roamed the streets of Tel Aviv in search of the parts needed to construct a tube tester. Sometimes the duo improvised. When their work required precision machinery, there was always the shop which produced fans and bicycle parts, owned by recent immigrants from Bulgaria.
Next on base was Zvi Riesel, who'd been in charge of the Israel Defense Forces radar workshop. How did he hear about the Weizmann job? "I saw an advertisement in the newspaper saying the Institute is looking for people to build an electronic computer."
A herd of young mathematicians-cum-olim were next. Phillip Rabinowitz, who'd worked on the Whirlwind Computer project, and who went on to the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, began by giving courses on programming at Weizmann. His students would eventually become Israel's first crop of computer experts.
Another new immigrant was Hans Jarosch. Jarosch (Ph.D., Aeronautical Engineering, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London), had just finished three years in the Israel Air Force. He was assigned the writing of application programs.
As the computer was nearing completion, Estrin and his wife returned to the U.S. Shortly after their departure, WEIZAC performed its first calculation, in October 1955. By early 1958, WEIZAC was put into full operation. In 1963, the Estrins came back for a brief visit to Israel, to attend a retirement and a birth. WEIZAC was being put out to pasture as a new generation of computer, the GOLEM, was about to be launched.
Estrin recalls: "Remarkable changes in Israel were evident. New roads, new buildings, new people, new problems. Before the start of the WEIZAC project there were no digital electronic computers in Israel. No electronic digital engineers. No programmers and no support personnel.
"The WEIZAC people succeeded in creating the technological know-how necessary for Israel to play a strong role in the information revolution."

    (From Interface, Spring/Summer 1998, "The Weizac Days")

• One of the founders of 2 faculties: Mathematics and Science Teaching
• Started the Israel Math Olympiad (now called in his name)
• Advised Achi Brandt

For more info, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gillis

Shimon Even was born in Israel on June 15th, 1935. He died on May 1st, 2004.
In addition to his pioneering research contributions (most notably to Graph Algorithms and Cryptography), Shimon is known for having been a highly influential educator. He played a major role in establishing computer science education in Israel (e.g., at the Weizmann Institute and the Technion). 

He served as a source of professional inspiration and as a role model for generations of young students and researchers. Two notable avenues of influence were his PhD students and his books Algorithmic Combinatorics (Macmillan, 1973) and Graph Algorithms (Computer Science Press, 1979).

Oded Schramm was uniquely creative and original mathematician. He was a beloved member of our faculty from 1992 to 1999. While at Weizmann, besides other dramatic math, he revolutionized two dimensional equilibrium statistical physics. 

More information can be found at his Wikipedia page.

Biographical Sketch

Amir Pnueli was born in Nahalal, Israel, in April 22, 1941. In 1945 he moved to Holon with his parents, Henia and Professor Shai Pnueli. His father was later one of the founders of Tel –Aviv University, and headed its Department of Hebrew Literature.
Amir studied at the Kugel High-school in Holon and the New High-school in Tel-Aviv. He later received his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1962, and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1967. His thesis, supervised by Haim Pekeris, the founder of the Applied Mathematics Department, was on the topic of "Calculation of Tides in the Ocean". He switched to computer science during his stay as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1967-1968.

In 1969 he returned from his postdoctoral studies to Israel as a researcher at the Weizmann Institute. In 1973 he moved to Tel Aviv University where he was the founder and first chair of the Computer Science Department. In 1981 he returned to the Weizmann Institute as a professor of computer science. From 1999 until his death, Pnueli also held a position at the Courant Institute's Department of Computer Science at New York University.

Amir Pnueli’s interests in computer science spanned wide areas. He is internationally recognized mostly for his pioneering work in the area of verification, and in particular for his work on introducing temporal logic to computer science and proposing the framework of temporal logic of programs.

In their early years, computers dealt mostly with simple input-output calculations. Verifying the correctness of a program of this type was a relatively simple matter. But with time, computers became more powerful and dealt with more complex tasks, and subsequently verification grew harder. Programmers dealing with complex systems with many inputs and rich ensemble of scenarios had to take into account the behavior of the system over time as the program must respond to new data and dynamically changing external signals.

Amir Pnueli became interested in this problem and looked for mechanisms that could help providing a better understanding and convenient tools for handling it. While studying this problem, he came across the field of philosophical logic called “tense logic”, which is used to evaluate logical formulas whose truthfulness changes over time. A formula in this framework may hold at some times and be false at other times, and the mechanism enables making statements about its correctness. Amir realized that this logic is just what’s needed in order to reason about the properties of computer programs. His insights on how this logic can be used for dealing with the correctness of computer programs appeared in 1977 in a landmark paper titled “The Temporal Logic of Programs.” Some twenty years later, in 1996, Amir received the 1996 Association for Computing Machinery Alan M. Turing Award, the highest distinction that can be bestowed on a computer scientist, for this 1977 paper. The award citation reads:

“Amir Pnueli made a major breakthrough in the verification and certification of concurrent and reactive systems with his landmark 1977 paper "The Temporal Logic of Programs" which was a crucial turning point in the progress of formal methods for such systems. This paper triggered a fundamental paradigm shift in reasoning about the dynamic behavior of systems; the techniques it introduces have had extraordinary influence and proved to be of lasting value. His work has been characterized as the most important contribution to program verification in the last twenty years and it has set the agenda for research and practice in the area.”

Indeed, temporal logic is used today in many applications for specifying and verifying properties of software and hardware. For example, manufacturers of VLSI chips use software employing temporal logic to verify that the various components printed on them perform their calculations as they were intended to, and programmers use temporal logic to minimize the number of errors in their software. All of those applications follow the paradigm developed by Amir over 30 years earlier.

Amir Pnueli was an extremely prolific and deeply creative researcher. He supervised more than 30 Ph.D. theses and wrote over 250 widely-cited publications and 4 books during his career. In recent years, he worked on compiler and translation validation, the verification of concurrent systems, the paradigm of model checking, and fairness of infinite behaviors, as well as the application of mathematical and logical methods to the formal specification, compositional verification, systematic development, and automatic synthesis of reactive, real-time, discrete, continuous, and hybrid systems.

Amir also believed in applying theory to practice. He was involved in founding two Israeli startup software firms, Mini-Systems in 1971 and AdCad in 1984. He shared the 2007 ACM Software System Award for Statemate, a software engineering tool that allows developers to formally specify the precise desired behavior of their programs. The citation for the award reads:

"Statemate was the first commercial computer-aided software engineering tool to successfully overcome the challenges of complex interactive, real time computer systems, known as reactive systems. The ideas reflected in Statemate underlie many of the most powerful and widely used tools in software and systems engineering today."

Amir was also the recipient of the Israel Prize, the state's highest honor. He was a foreign associate of the National Academy of Engineering, a foreign member of the Academia Europaea (Informatics section), and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France, and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany, as well as numerous other professional accolades.

Amir was a modest, kind, and warm person who was universally respected as a friend, teacher, colleague and distinguished leader. He was married to Ariela and had two daughters, Shira and Noga, and a son, Ishay. He died on November 2, 2009, in NY, of a brain hemorrhage. The following year the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Weizmann Institute of Science established the Pnueli Memorial Lecture, which is presented annually.