Jean-Raymond Abrial

Jean-Raymond Abrial (born 1938) is a French computer scientist and inventor of the Z and B formal methods.

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 within the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now Oxford University Department of Computer Science), and later the B-Method (normally used for software development), two leading formal methods for software engineering. He is the author of The B-Book: Assigning Programs to Meanings. For much of his career he has been an independent consultant, as much at home working with industry as academia. Latterly, he became a Professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.