Jean-Raymond Abrial

Jean-Raymond Abrial (6 November 1938 – 26 May 2025) was a French computer scientist and originator of the Z and B formal methods.

Life and career Abrial was born on 6 November 1938. He was a student at the École Polytechnique (class of 1958). He also attended Master's courses at Stanford University during 1963–65. laid the foundation for a formal approach to Data Models; although not adopted directly by practitioners, it directly influenced all subsequent models from the Entity-Relationship Model through to RDF.

J.-R. Abrial is the father of the Z notation (typically used for formal specification of software), during his time at the Programming Research Group under Prof. Tony Hoare within the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now Oxford University Department of Computer Science), arriving in 1979 and sharing an office and collaborating with Cliff Jones. He later initiated the B-Method, with better tool-based software development support for refinement from a high-level specification to an executable program, including the Rodin tool. These are two important formal methods approaches for software engineering. He is the author of The B-Book: Assigning Programs to Meanings. For much of his career he was an independent consultant. He was an invited professor at ETH Zurich from 2004 to 2009. He developed the B approach further as Event-B.

Abrial was elected to be a Member of the Academia Europaea in 2006.

Death He died on 26 May 2025, at the age of 86.