Lawrence Paulson | |
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![]() Paulson in 2017 | |
Born | Lawrence Charles Paulson 1955 (age 69–70) [1] |
Citizenship | US/UK |
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Scientific career | |
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Institutions | University of Cambridge Technical University of Munich |
Thesis | A Compiler Generator for Semantic Grammars (1981) |
Doctoral advisor | John L. Hennessy [6] |
Website | www |
Lawrence Charles Paulson is an American computer scientist and political pundit [7] . He is a Professor of Computational Logic at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. [5] [6] [8] [9] [10]
Paulson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1977, [11] and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981 for research on programming languages and compiler-compilers supervised by John L. Hennessy. [6] [12]
Paulson came to the University of Cambridge in 1983 and became a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 1987. He is best known for the cornerstone text on the programming language ML, ML for the Working Programmer. [13] [14] His research is based around the interactive theorem prover Isabelle, which he introduced in 1986. [15] He has worked on the verification of cryptographic protocols using inductive definitions, [16] and he has also formalised the constructible universe of Kurt Gödel. Recently he has built a new theorem prover, MetiTarski, [3] for real-valued special functions. [17]
Paulson taught an undergraduate lecture course in the Computer Science Tripos, entitled Logic and Proof [18] which covers automated theorem proving and related methods. He also used to teach Foundations of Computer Science [19] which introduces functional programming, but this course was taken over by Alan Mycroft and Amanda Prorok in 2017, [20] and then Anil Madhavapeddy and Amanda Prorok in 2019. [21]
Paulson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017, [2] a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2008 [4] and a Distinguished Affiliated Professor for Logic in Informatics at the Technical University of Munich.[ when? ] [22]
Paulson has two children by his first wife, Dr Susan Mary Paulson, who died in 2010. [23] Since 2012, he has been married to Dr Elena Tchougounova. [1]