Antoni Mazurkiewicz

Antoni Wiesław Mazurkiewicz (born June 27, 1934) was a Polish computer scientist affiliated with the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Informatics at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, who made foundational contributions to the theory of programming, models of concurrent and distributed systems, the decomposition of Petri nets, and synchronizing networks. He is best known for inventing trace theory, introducing what became known as Mazurkiewicz traces, a generalization of strings in which certain letters are allowed to commute, used to represent the non-sequential behavior of concurrent processes through their sequential observations; the concept became a cornerstone of the theory of concurrency.