Bob Coecke

Professor Bob Coecke

Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures

Fellow, Wolfson College

E: coecke(a)cs.ox.ac.uk

T: +44 1865 273829

T: +44 785 5298183

Room 210, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD

Themes:

Completed Projects:

Interests

I am interested in the Foundations of Physics, in particular the structures involved, with a strong structural bias towards Logic, Order and Category Theory, and their applications e.g. arXiv. I am also active on compositional distributional models of natural language meaming e.g. arXiv. Some popural writing on my work are `The quantum linguist' and `Quantum mechanical words and mathematical organisms'. Older work includes information domains e.g. arXiv, dynamic epistemic logic e.g. arXiv, and even longer ago, contextual hidden variable models and quantum logic. I currently have twenty plus PhD students; links to them are below, and here are some past MSc and DPhil thesis in our group. I lead a multidisciplinary research group, the Quantum Group, which now has 50 plus members. More details on my research and links to publications and talks are on my extremely outdated old informal webpage.

NOT SO RECENT ANYMORE STUFF:

[Aug'11] The paper with Raymon d Lal underpinning my FQXi grant entitled Time-asymmetry of probabilities versus relativistic causal structure: an arrow of time is now available.

[Jul'11] I am retrospectively awarded the title of Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures, starting October 2010.

[Jun'11] The interdepartmental project "Quantum Nanoscience: Fundamental Physics, Emerging Structures, and Implications for our Ultimate Reality" has now started. It involves Computer Science (PI myself, RA Jamie Vicary), Materials (Experiments: PI Andrew Briggs, RA TBC - Theory: PI Simon Benjamin, RA Erik Gauger), Philosophy (PI Chris Timpson, RA Owen Maroney), and Physics (Vlatko Vedral,Dieter Jaksch), and is jointly funded by the CQT in Singapore and JTF.

[May'11] Our "quantum physics -> natural language processing"-research (cf. this paper and this New Scientist coverage) is the cover feature of this summer's issue of our departments industry newsletter. The article is an easy read for those interested.

[Mar'11] My 80 page paper with Ross Duncan entitled Interacting Quantum Observables: Categorical Algebra and Diagrammatics is the first category-theory related paper to appear in the New Journal of Physics. It starts with a 40 page tutorial on categorical quantum mechanics.

[Jan'11] I obtained an FQXi Large Grant entitled A relativistic universe of interacting quantum processes, jointly written with my student Raymond Lal.

[Jan'11] My paper Quantum Picturalism is in the top 10 of most downloaded papers of the journal Contemporary Physics.

[Dec'10] Some of our research features in the 11 December 2010 issue of New Scientist. It made the cover heading as Quantum Linguistics Leap forward for artificial intelligence. Here is the paper jointly written with Stephen Clark and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh which it talks about, and here is a scan of that New Scientist issue.

[Nov'10] The 1000 page volume New Structures For Physics (B. Coecke, Ed., Springer-Verlag) is now available. Here, here, here and here are some example chapters, this is the editorial.

Biography

My previous affiliations are: the Free University of Brussels where I obtained my Doctorate in Theoretical Physics, Imperial College in London where I was a post-doc in the Theoretical Physics Group, and the Mathematics and Statistics Department of McGill University in Montreal where I was a post-doc in the Category Theory Group. I was also formally affiliated to the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics of Cambridge University, on a research grant of the European TMR network Linear Logic in Computer Science. I have been offered a Long Term Visiting Scientists position at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which I took up for a period of 3 months in 2009. I held an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow entitled The Structure of Quantum Information and its Ramifications for IT Aug 2006 - Jul 2011, and University Lecturer of Quantum Computer Science Jun 2007 - Sept 2010, until I became Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures, a title awarded retrospectively in July 2011 to take effect from October 2010. I am a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College since Jun 2007. I coordinated the EC FP6 STREP Foundational Structures in Quantum Information and Computation (QICS) - I also hold/held several EPSRC, ONR, JTF and FQXi grants.