Bob Coecke


Bob Coecke is a theoretical physicist, professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University, and a pioneer of categorical quantum mechanics and ZX-calculus.

Education and career

Coecke obtained his Doctorate in Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1996, and performed postdoctorate work in the Theoretical Physics Group of Imperial College, London and in the Category Theory Group of the Mathematics and Statistics Department at McGill University in Montreal, and was formally affiliated with the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics of Cambridge University. He was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, where he became Lecturer in Quantum Computer Science in 2007, and jointly with Samson Abramsky leads the Quantum Group. In 2009, he worked as visiting scientist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In July 2011, he was nominated professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University, with retroactive effect as of October 2010. He is a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford since 2007.

Work

Coecke's research focuses on the foundations of physics, more particularly category theory and logic, and more recently, diagrammatic reasoning, with application to quantum informatics and quantum gravity. He has pioneered categorical quantum mechanics together with Samson Abramsky, and spearheaded the development of a diagrammatic quantum formalism based on Penrose graphical notation on which he wrote a textbook entitled Picturing Quantum Processes, with Aleks Kissinger. He also pioneered the categorical distributional natural language meaning, with Stephen Clark and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh.
He has organised events at the interface of quantum foundations, logic and category theory; in particular, he has participated in committees organising international workshops on quantum physics, logic, and quantum programming.

Media reception

The work of Coecke and his co-workers on the application of categorical quantum mechanics to natural language processing in computational linguistics was featured in New Scientist in December 2010.

Publications

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