David Harel
(unknown - .)
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Harel gained his Bachelor of Science from Bar-Ilan University in 1974, his Masters of Science from Tel-Aviv University in 1976 and his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. He has held a chair in mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980. He worked in a diverse range of areas in theoretical computer science including: computability theory, database theory, logic of programs and automata theory. He is best known for his invention of the language of statecharts, which extended finite-state automata allowing complex and concurrent states to be modelled. By applying abstraction to solve the problem of complex reactive systems his visual formalism allowed clustering, concurrency and refinement to be modeled. His work is important to the UML because the UML state machine is based upon his work, thereby allowing the UML to be used to model complex reactive systems.
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