Edmund Clarke

Edmund Melson Clarke Jr. (July 27, 1945 to December 22, 2020) was an American computer scientist who developed model checking, a method for automatically and exhaustively verifying that a hardware or software design meets a formal specification. He shared the 2007 ACM Turing Award with E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis for originating this technique and developing it into a tool used throughout the hardware and software industries to catch design errors that testing alone would miss. Clarke spent most of his career at Carnegie Mellon University, where he held the FORE Systems Professorship, after earlier faculty positions at Duke University and Harvard University, and he died from complications of COVID-19 in December 2020.