E. Allen Emerson

Ernest Allen Emerson II (June 2, 1954 – October 15, 2024) was an American computer scientist and winner of the 2007 Turing Award. He was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1981 to 2016.

Emerson is credited together with Edmund M. Clarke and Joseph Sifakis for the invention and development of model checking, a technique used in formal verification of software and hardware. His contributions to temporal logic and modal logic include the introduction of computation tree logic (CTL) and its extension CTL*, which are used in the verification of concurrent systems. He is also recognized along with others for developing symbolic model checking to address combinatorial explosion that arises in many model checking algorithms.

Early life and education Emerson was born in Dallas, Texas, on June 2, 1954. His early experiences with computing included exposure to BASIC, Fortran, and ALGOL 60 on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System and Burroughs large systems computers. He taught at the university for 35 years. He held the title of Regents Chair Emeritus.