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 the Thomasschule he was in 1944 drafted into the Wehrmacht and eventually went into British captivity.
Petri started studying mathematics at the Technischen Hochschule Hannover in 1950. He documented the Petri net in 1962 as part of his dissertation, Kommunikation mit Automaten. He worked from 1959 until 1962 at the University of Bonn and received his PhD degree in 1962 from the Technische Universität Darmstadt. From 1963 to 1968 he 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.Awards
Petri was honored with the following awards:
