Carl Adam Petri


Carl Adam Petri was a German mathematician and computer scientist.

Life and work

Petri created his major scientific contribution, the concept of the Petri net, in 1939 at the age of 13, for the purpose of describing chemical processes. In 1941, his father told him about Konrad Zuse's work on computing machines and Carl Adam started building his own analog computer.
After earning his Abitur at Thomasschule in 1944, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He was taken into British captivity until 1949, when he departed England.
Petri started studying mathematics at the Technische Hochschule Hannover in 1950. He documented Petri nets in 1962 as part of his dissertation, Kommunikation mit Automaten. From 1959 until 1962 he worked at the University of Bonn and received his PhD degree in 1962 from the Technische Universität Darmstadt. From 1963 to 1968 he established and directed the computing centre of Bonn University. In 1968, he became head of Forschungsinstitut für Informationssysteme of the newly founded Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung. He retired in 1991.
In 1988, Petri became honorary professor of the University of Hamburg. He was a member of the Academia Europaea.
Petri's work significantly advanced the fields of parallel computing and distributed computing, and it helped define the modern studies of complex systems and workflow management systems. His contributions have been in the broader area of network theory, which includes coordination models and theories of interaction, and eventually led to the formal study of software connectors.

Books, papers, and presentations

  • 1962
  • * Kommunikation mit Automaten by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1976
  • * Nicht-sequentielle Prozesse by Carl Adam Petri
  • * Kommunikationsdisziplinen by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1977
  • * General net theory by Carl Adam Petri
  • * Communication disciplines by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1979
  • * Concurrency as a basis of systems thinking by Carl Adam Petri
  • * Ansätze zur Organisationstheorie rechnergestützter Informationssysteme by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1980
  • * Concurrency by Carl Adam Petri
  • * Introduction to General Net Theory by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1982
  • * State-Transition Structures in Physics and Computation by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1987
  • * Concurrency Theory by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1996
  • * Nets, Time and Space by Carl Adam Petri
  • 1997
  • * Ansprache anläßlich der Verleihung des Werner-von-Siemens-Rings by Carl Adam Petri
  • 2008
  • * Petri Nets by Carl Adam Petri and Wolfgang Reisig

Awards

Petri was honored with the following awards: