Professor Amir Panoli passed away in November 13 years ago. Professor Panoli was born in Moshav Nahalel in 1941, and at the age of 26 he already completed his doctoral studies in applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute. During his post-doctoral studies at Stanford, he was introduced to a new field - computer science, and when he returned to Israel he initiated and founded the computer science department at Tel Aviv University.
In 1996, he was also the first Israeli to win the Turing Prize. The prize equivalent to the Nobel Prize, which is not awarded to mathematicians. The article that earned him the prize talks about Temporal Logic - time logic is a mathematical language, in which it is possible to formulate and prove sentences that assert claims related to the time dimension as well. (In his own words - "Now the reality is like this, and these facts are true, but tomorrow the reality will change, and together with you, the facts will also change").
In 2000, Professor Panoli will win the Israel Prize, and after him other Israelis will win the Turing Prize - Adi Shamir (2002) who contributed a third of the letters - RSA, and Shafi Goldswehr (2012).
In 1998 in the early days of the AppSec world, we worked hard at Sanctum Inc. to develop the first Application Firewall system, and Professor Panoli helped us prove its immunity based on the same methods.
Professor Panoli has prepared generations of computer science and mathematics students, paved the way for scientists from all over the world to integrate the concept of time in mathematics, and demonstrated in practice the need for combining academic excellence with the high-tech industry.
