Edmund Clarke, “a giant in computer science,” died Tuesday of COVID-19.
A faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University for almost 40 years, Clarke won computer science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Working with others, he developed model checking, an automated method for detecting design errors in computer hardware and software.
"With Ed Clarke's passing, the world lost a giant in computer science and CMU said goodbye to a beloved member of our community," said Farnam Jahanian, President of Carnegie Mellon University. "Ed’s pioneering work in model checking applied formal computational methods to the ultimate challenge: computers checking their own correctness. As systems become ever more complex, we are just beginning to see the wide-reaching and long-term benefits of Ed's insights, which will continue to inspire researchers and practitioners for years to come.”
Clarke won the A.M. Turing Award in 2007, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He was 75.