Carl Adam Petri

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Carl Adam Petri (2009)

Carl Adam Petri (born July 12, 1926 in Leipzig ; † July 2, 2010 in Siegburg ) was a German mathematician and computer scientist . He is best known for the Petri nets named after him for modeling distributed systems .

Live and act

family

Carl Adam Petri was born on July 12, 1926 in Leipzig as the son of the mathematician and chess player Max Petri (born August 22, 1888 - May 6, 1972) and Elfriede , née Dietze . One of his father's uncle was Pastor Otto Oehlkers , who worked in Linden .

Career

Carl Adam Petri was born in Leipzig on July 12, 1926 . His father, who has a doctorate in maths, introduced his son to mathematics as a child and made him enthusiastic about the natural sciences. For example, on his 12th birthday he received two thick chemistry textbooks from the bankruptcy estate of a bookstore. At the age of 13, Petri invented the Petri nets with their graphics and rules for describing chemical processes. Thanks to his father's connections, Petri had access to the central library in Leipzig with the works by Einstein and Heisenberg (which were banned at the time) . In 1941 he learned from his father about Konrad Zuse and his work with calculating machines, whereupon he dealt with the physical laws for the purpose of calculating and automata and even built himself a small analog computer .

In 1944 Petri passed his secondary school diploma at the Thomas School in Leipzig and was drafted into the military shortly afterwards. He became an anti-aircraft helper in the Air Force and was taken prisoner by the British. While still in captivity, Petri was concerned with the differences between the analog and the digital computer. He became convinced that digital calculation methods are more versatile and reliable. After the war he stayed in England until 1949 and worked on solutions to surveying problems (for example the creation of concentric ellipses on hilly terrain). However, he did not give up his thoughts on calculating machines.

In 1950 Petri returned to Germany and began studying mathematics at the Technical University of Hanover . There he received, among other things, a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation . The just developing computer science occupied him further, because in 1955 he attended a training course at IBM . After he received his diploma in mathematics in 1956, he became a research assistant at the TH Hannover and later at the University of Bonn. In 1962 Petri received his doctorate in natural science at the Technical University of Darmstadt . The title of his dissertation is “Communication with Automata” and it deals with, among other things, simultaneous models ( Petri nets ).

From 1963 Petri set up the computer center at Bonn University and managed it until 1968. Here he had the opportunity to continue working on his network theory, which was partly linked to the practice of the computer center. After founding the Society for Mathematics and Data Processing (GMD) in 1968, he set up the Research Institute for Information Systems and ran it until 1991. During this time, collaborations with many European countries, the USA, India, Chile and China were established. After retiring in 1991, he continued to develop and publish his ideas.

Dissertation "Communication with Automata"

The title of the dissertation is deliberately ambiguous: on the one hand, it can mean communicating with a machine as a human being (Turing's thought experiment: Turing test ) or communication between people with the help of automatons. Petri himself has indicated that the second meaning of the title is intended, but that his dissertation is mainly devoted to the first interpretation.

Petri's work is not a conventional dissertation in which an open problem is solved or a new theory is presented and worked out. As in many of his later works, Petri formulated a wealth of suggestions and proposals for a new basis for theoretical computer science, which are more like sketches for a research program. His work begins with a very specific problem that arises in the machine calculation of recursive functions. With these functions, it is generally not possible to predict how much memory they will require for calculation. You can “try out” whether the function is terminated and the computing resources are sufficient. If this is not the case, however, you have to restart the calculation with more resources. At this point, Petri asks the question whether it is not possible to add more resources to the computing system in order to simply continue computing. Can such a computer architecture be implemented that can be expanded at will? Conventional architecture is reaching its limits. That is why Petri proposes a completely new architecture. It provides that the system consists of individual components, each of which works independently and therefore asynchronously. Many of the individual components then result in a large system that can be expanded with additional components. With the design of an asynchronous working stack, he wants to show that asynchronous systems are more efficient than synchronous ones.

Petri went on to argue that it was inappropriate to base computer science on sequential models. Instead of assigning events to time, one should order according to the cause-effect principle. In addition, the notion of global states as used in sequential models should be given up. In the real world, an action changes only a few components, but not the entire system. In this work Petri uses graphs with special notations and rules, the Petri nets, to illustrate and model asynchronous systems .

Awards, honors and memberships

  • In 1962, Professor Alwin Walther from Darmstadt recognized the importance of Petri's work and ensured that it was recognized as the best dissertation of the academic year 1961/62.
  • 1985: Honorary Chairman of the ICPN Steering Committee
  • 1988: Award of the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany
  • 1988: Appointment as honorary professor at the University of Hamburg , where he holds seminars on general network theory until 1994
  • 1989: Elected member of the Academia Europaea elected
  • 1993: Awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal for services to computer science
  • 1997: Petri received the Werner von Siemens Ring from Federal President Professor Roman Herzog for outstanding services to technology in connection with science.
  • Since 1997 Petri was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences .
  • 1998 First award of the "Carl Adam Petri Distinguished Technical Achievement Award" - named after him - by the "Society for Design and Process Science".
  • 1999 Honorary doctorate from the University of Zaragoza
  • 2003 Awarded the “Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw” ( Order of the Dutch Lion ) by the Dutch Queen
  • In 2007 the “Academy of Transdisciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies” (ATLAS) awarded him the “Academy Gold Medal of Honor” for his life's work.
  • In 2009 Petri received the "IEEE Computer Pioneer Award".

Web links

Commons : Carl Adam Petri  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

biography

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Einar Smith: Carl Adam Petri. A biography . Springer-Vieweg, 2014, ISBN 978-3-642-40222-7 , passim ; Preview over google books
  2. ↑ Bernd Gräfrath (responsible): Max Petri / Schach-Echo 1956 / 2nd prize , transcription of the magazine Die Schwalbe , issue 262, August 2013, on the website of the Schwalbe - German association for problem chess , last accessed on May 16, 2017
  3. ↑ Computer Science University of Hamburg
  4. ↑ Petri laudation
  5. ↑ PetriNets / history ( MS Word ; 160 kB)
  6. ↑ Fernuni Hagen
  7. ↑ idw-online. 305378
  8. ^ Curriculum vitae Petri ( Memento from May 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Petri, Carl Adam
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician and computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH July 2, 2010
Place of death Siegburg