Bob Coecke

Bob Coecke
Bob Coecke
Born	(1968-07-23) 23 July 1968
Fields	Quantum Foundations Category Theory Quantum Information Computational Linguistics Causality[1]
Institutions	University of Oxford University of Cambridge McGill University Imperial College London
Alma mater	Vrije Universiteit Brussel (PhD)
Thesis	Hidden Measurement Systems (1996)
Doctoral advisor	Diederik Emiel Aerts Jean Reignier[2]
Doctoral students	Andrei Akhvlediani Philip Atzemoglou Ed Blakey Bill Edwards Edward Grefenstette Aleks Kissinger Raymond Lal Hugo Nava-Kopp Karin Verelst[2]
Website www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/bob.coecke/

Bob Coecke (born 1968) is a theoretical physicist, professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University, and a pioneer of categorical quantum mechanics.

Education and career

Coecke obtained his Doctorate in Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1996 ^[2] 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.^[3] 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.^[3] 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 Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford since 2007.^[3][4][5]

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.^[6] 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;^[7] in particular, he has participated in committees organising international workshops on quantum physics, logic, and quantum programming.^[8][9][10]

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.^[11]

Publications

Books (as editor)

• Bob Coecke (ed.): New Structures for Physics, Lecure Notes in Physics 813, Springer, 2011, ISBN 978-3642128202
• Bob Coecke, David Moore, Alexander Wilce (eds.): Current Research in Operational Quantum Logic: Algebras, Categories, Languages, Fundamental Theories of Physics, Kluwer Academic, 2010, ISBN 978-9048154371

Articles (selection)

• Bob Coecke, Raymond Lal: Time-asymmetry of probabilities versus relativistic causal structure: an arrow of time, arXiv:1108.1988 (submitted 9 August 2011, version of 6 September 2011)
• Bob Coecke, Raymond Lal: Causal categories: relativistically interacting processes, arXiv:1107.6019 (submitted 29 July 2011)
• Bob Coecke‚ Quanlong Wang‚ Baoshan Wang‚ Yongjun Wang, Qiye Zhang: Graphical Calculus for Quantum Key Distribution, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 270, no. 2, pp. 231−249, 2011
• Bob Coecke‚ Bill Edwards, Robert W. Spekkens: Phase groups and the origin of non−locality for qubits, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 270, no. 2, pp. 15−36, 2011, arXiv:1003.5005 (submitted 25 March 2010)
• Samson Abramsky, Bob Coecke: Abstract physical traces, arXiv:0910.3144 (submitted 16 October 2009)
• Bob Coecke: Quantum Picturalism, arXiv:0908.1787 (submitted 13 August 2009)
• Bob Coecke, Ross Duncan: Interacting quantum observables, Automata, Languages and Programming, pp. 298–310, 2008
• B Coecke, D Pavlovic, J Vicary: A new description of orthogonal bases, arXiv:0810.0812 (submitted 5 October 2008)
• A Baltag, B Coecke, M Sadrzadeh: Epistemic actions as resources, Journal of Logic and Computation 17 (3), pp. 555–585, 2007
• B Coecke, D Pavlovic: Quantum measurements without sums, arXiv:quant-ph/0608035 (submitted 3 August 2006, version of 7 August 2008)
• Bob Coecke: Introducing categories to the practicing physicist, in: Giandomenico Sica (ed.): What is category theory, Polimetrica, 45–74, 2006, ISBN 978-8876990311 / ISBN 88-7699-031-3
• B Coecke: Kindergarten quantum mechanics, arXiv:quant-ph/0510032 (submitted 4 October 2005)
• Samson Abramsky, Bob Coecke: A categorical semantics of quantum protocols, Proceedings of the 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 2004, pp. 415–425
• B Coecke: The logic of entanglement, arXiv:quant-ph/0402014 (submitted 2 February 2004, version of 2 March 2004)

See also

References

External links

• Profile at Google Scholar
• Publications, DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, uni-trier.de
• Lectures by Bob Coecke, Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA)
• Bob Coecke, oxford.academia.eu