In Memoriam: Carl Adam Petri

Abstract

Carl Adam Petri was a visionary who founded an extraordinarily fruitful domain of study in the field of distributed discrete event systems. He was the first computer scientist to identify concurrency as a fundamental aspect of computing. He did so in his seminal PhD thesis from 1962 where in fact he outlined a whole new foundations for computer science. He devoted the rest of his working life to pursuing his ambitious and far reaching research goals. Petri nets -the core model that arose out of his thesis- have established themselves as a central model of distributed systems. They possess a rich theory, have been extended along multiple dimensions and are used in an astonishingly wide variety of domains.

Carl Adam passed away on July 2, 2010. His loss is felt deeply by friends and colleagues around the world. As a tribute, this contribution briefly surveys C. A. Petri’s scientific life and impact.