In Memoriam: Robin Milner and Amir Pnueli

IN the last six months, the computing community, including software engineering, lost two of its greats: Robin Milner and Amir Pnueli. Both were Turing Award winners, and both contributed in fundamental ways to the foundations of software engineering. I had the privilege of meeting Robin Milner only, and my overriding memory is of a modest, gentle, approachable man, as open to other’s ideas as he was skilled at generating them. By all accounts, friends and colleagues speak equally warmly of Amir Pnueli—of his intellect, his wit, and his humor. Tributes to both individuals have been published widely both in the press and on the Internet. I have included below short biographies of Professors Milner and Pnueli, extracted from their Web pages. I present these in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering as a small tribute to two outstanding computer scientists, and as an acknowledgment of their seminal contributions to our discipline.