Bob Coecke

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 a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford since 2007.[3][4][5]

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, quantum gravity, and NLP .[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's a founding father of the Quantum Physics and Logic and the Applied Category Theory conference series, and of the diamond-open-access journal Compositionally.

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.[7] The work on quantum natural language processing was featured in the Quantum Daily in December 2020 and in PhysicsWorld in January 2021.

Textbooks

• Bob Coecke, Aleks Kissinger:Picturing Quantum Processes. A First Course in Quantum Theory and Diagrammatic Reasoning, Cambridge University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1316219317

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)

• Will Zeng, Bob Coecke: Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Natural Language Processing, arXiv:1608.01406
• Bob Coecke, Tobias Fritz, Robert Spekkens: A mathematical theory of resources, arXiv:1409.5531
• Bob Coecke, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Steven Clark: Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning, arXiv:1003.4394
• Bob Coecke: Quantum Picturalism, arXiv:0908.1787
• Bob Coecke, Ross Duncan: Interacting quantum observables, Automata, Languages and Programming, pp. 298–310, 2008
• Bob Coecke: Kindergarten quantum mechanics, arXiv:quant-ph/0510032
• 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

• 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