Carl Adam Petri

Carl Adam Petri was a German mathematician and computer scientist, born in Leipzig on 12 July 1926 and died in Siegburg on 2 July 2010. He is remembered above all for the Petri net, a way of describing processes that run side by side, which by his own later account he first conceived at the age of 13 to describe chemical processes. After wartime service and British captivity he studied mathematics at the Technische Hochschule Hannover from 1950, set out Petri nets in his 1962 dissertation Kommunikation mit Automaten, and took his doctorate at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He then built and directed the computing centre of the University of Bonn and from 1968 led the information systems research institute of the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung until he retired in 1991. His work advanced parallel and distributed computing and the study of workflow systems. Honours include the Konrad Zuse Medal, the Werner von Siemens Ring and an IEEE Computer Pioneer Award.