David Harel

David Harel was born in 1950 in London

Harel was born in London in 1950 to Joyce and Aharon Harel-Fisch. He grew up in Leeds, where his father taught literature, and the family moved to Israel when he was 7. His father later taught English literature at Bar-Ilan University and served as its rector.

He studied at the Netiv Meir yeshiva in Jerusalem. In 1968 he joined the IDF and served in the Nahal, fighting in the Yom Kippur War.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Bar-Ilan University in 1974, a master's from Tel Aviv University in 1976, and a doctorate on dynamic logic from MIT in 1978. He then spent 2 years as a postdoctoral researcher at IBM's research center.

He joined the Weizmann Institute in 1980, headed its applied mathematics and computer science department from 1989 to 1995, and was dean of its faculty of mathematics and computer science from 1998 to 2005. In the 1980s he created Statecharts, a graphical language for reactive systems that became part of the UML standard. He co-founded Ad-Cad in 1983, which merged into I-Logix in 1987.

He has written books on computer science for the public and presented series on radio and television. He received the Israel Prize in 2004 and is active in peace and human rights groups. In 2021 he gave his Israel Prize statuette to Oded Goldreich at a private ceremony.