Philip Lee Wadler (born April 8, 1956) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

known for his contributions to

programming language design A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming la ...

and type theory. He is the chair of Theoretical Computer Science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has contributed to the theory behind functional programming and the use of

monads in functional programming In functional programming, a monad is a software design pattern with a structure that combines program fragments ( functions) and wraps their return values in a type with additional computation. In addition to defining a wrapping monadic type, m ...

, the design of the purely functional language Haskell, and the XQuery declarative query language. In 1984, he created the Orwell programming language. Wadler was involved in adding generic types to Java 5.0. He is also author of the paper ''Theorems for free!'' that gave rise to much research on functional language optimization (see also Parametricity).

Education

Wadler received a Bachelor of Science degree in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1977, and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in 1979. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. His thesis was entitled ''Listlessness is Better than Laziness'' and was supervised by

Nico Habermann Arie Nicolaas Habermann (26 June 1932 – 8 August 1993), often known as Nico Habermann, was a noted Dutch computer scientist. Habermann was born in Groningen, Netherlands, and earned his B.S. in mathematics and physics and M.S. in mathematics f ...

Research and career

Wadler's research interests are in programming languages. Wadler was a research fellow at the

Programming Research Group The Programming Research Group (PRG) was part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (OUCL) in Oxford, England, along with the Numerical Analysis Group, until OUCL became the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Department ...

(part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory) and

St Cross College, Oxford St Cross College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Founded in 1965, St Cross is an all-graduate college with gothic and traditional-style buildings on a central site in St Giles', just south of Pusey Street. It a ...

during 1983–87. He was progressively lecturer, reader, and professor at the University of Glasgow from 1987 to 1996. Wadler was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies (1996–99) and then at Avaya Labs (1999–2003). Since 2003, he has been professor of theoretical computer science in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Wadler was editor of the '' Journal of Functional Programming'' from 1990 to 2004. Wadler is currently working on a new functional language designed for writing web applications, called ''Links''. He has supervised numerous doctoral students to completion. Since 2003, Wadler has been a professor of theoretical computer science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and is the chair of Theoretical Computer Science. He is also a member of the university's

Blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a ...

Technology Laboratory. He has a h-index of 72 with 26,874 citations at Google Scholar. As of December 2018 Wadler was area leader for programming languages at IOHK, the blockchain engineering company developing Cardano.

Awards and honours

Wadler received the ''Most Influential POPL Paper Award'' in 2003 for the 1993 POPL Symposium paper ''Imperative Functional Programming'', jointly with Simon Peyton Jones. In 2005, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2007, he was inducted as an ACM Fellow by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

(ACM).ACM fellowship award page
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References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Wadler, Philip 1956 births Living people Stanford University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni American computer scientists British computer scientists Members of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford Fellows of St Cross College, Oxford Academics of the University of Glasgow Scientists at Bell Labs Academics of the University of Edinburgh Functional programming Programming language researchers Formal methods people Academic journal editors Computer science writers American textbook writers American male non-fiction writers Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery American expatriates in the United Kingdom People associated with Cardano