Yuri Gurevich
American computer scientist
Yuri Gurevich, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is an American computer scientist and mathematician and the inventor of abstract state machines.
Gurevich was born and educated in the Soviet Union. He taught mathematics there and then in Israel before moving to the United States in 1982.
The best-known work of his Soviet period is on the classical decision problem.
In Israel, Gurevich worked with Saharon Shelah on
monadic second-order theories.
The Forgetful Determinacy Theorem of Gurevich–Harrington is of that period as well.
From 1982 to 1998, Gurevich taught computer science at the University of Michigan, where he started to work on various aspects of computational complexity theory
including average case complexity.
He became one of the founders of the emerging field of finite model theory.
Most importantly, he became interested in the problem of what an algorithm is. This led him to the theory of abstract state machines (ASMs).
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8061506. VIAF identifies the subject as 15336161. The Library of Congress control number is n93015956. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yuri Gurevich” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.