Petri Nets History

• About Carl Adam Petri, who was the first to formally define the Petri Nets language. Petri did so with his PhD thesis (Kommunikation mit Automaten) in the beginning of the 60'ies.
  • There is an excellent article about Carl Adam Petri, his exceptional life, and work. The article Carl Adam Petri and "Petri Nets" was written by Wilfried Brauer and Wolfgang Reisig and was translated from Informatik-Spektrum, Vol. 29, Nr. 5, pp. 369-374, Springer Verlag, 2006. You can download it here as [pdf] or [doc]. The German version can also be obtained as [pdf] or [doc].

  • Carl Adam Petri has a homepage, with bibliography and Curriculum Vitae, at the following WWW address:
    • http://www2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/tgi/mitarbeiter/profs/petri_eng.html

  • There are several photographs available online of C.A. Petri: Dagstuhl 1996, and Zaragoza 1999.

  • In 2009 Carl Adam Petri received the prestigious IEEE Computer Pioneer Award 2008 "For establishing Petri net theory in 1962, which not only was cited by hundreds of thousands of scientific publications but also significantly advanced the fields of parallel and distributed computing." (The quote is taken from the IEEE webpage here.