Matthew Hennessy

Last updated

Matthew Hennessy is an Irish computer scientist who has contributed especially to concurrency, process calculi and programming language semantics.

Contents

Career

During 1976–77, Matthew Hennessy was an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. [1] Then during 1977–78, he was a visiting professor at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil. Subsequently, he was a research associate (1979–81) and then lecturer (1981–85) at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. During 1985, he was a guest lecturer/researcher at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Hennessy was Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, England, from 1985 until 2008. [2] Since then, Hennessy has held a research professorship at the Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin.

Hennessy's research interests are in the area of the semantic foundations of programming and specification languages, particularly involving distributed computing, including mobile computing. [3] He also has an interest in verification tools. His co-authors include Robin Milner and Gordon Plotkin.

Hennessy is a member of the Academy of Europe. [1] He held a Royal Society/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship during 2005–06 and has a Science Foundation Ireland Research Professorship at Trinity College Dublin.

Books

Matthew Hennessy has written a number of books:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Milner</span> British computer scientist (1934–2010)

Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner, known as Robin Milner or A. J. R. G. Milner, was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.

In programming language theory, semantics is the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. Semantics assigns computational meaning to valid strings in a programming language syntax.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge</span>

The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. As of 2023 it employed 56 faculty members, 45 support staff, 105 research staff, and about 205 research students. The current Head of Department is Professor Ann Copestake.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh</span>

The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former Department of Artificial Intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the Department of Computer Science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samson Abramsky</span> British computer scientist

Samson Abramsky is Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He was previously the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at the University of Oxford, from 2000 to 2021. He has made contributions to the areas of domain theory, the lazy lambda calculus, strictness analysis, concurrency theory, interaction categories, geometry of interaction, game semantics and quantum computing. More recently, he has been applying methods from categorical semantics to finite model theory, with applications to descriptive complexity.

Bunched logic is a variety of substructural logic proposed by Peter O'Hearn and David Pym. Bunched logic provides primitives for reasoning about resource composition, which aid in the compositional analysis of computer and other systems. It has category-theoretic and truth-functional semantics, which can be understood in terms of an abstract concept of resource, and a proof theory in which the contexts Γ in an entailment judgement Γ ⊢ A are tree-like structures (bunches) rather than lists or (multi)sets as in most proof calculi. Bunched logic has an associated type theory, and its first application was in providing a way to control the aliasing and other forms of interference in imperative programs. The logic has seen further applications in program verification, where it is the basis of the assertion language of separation logic, and in systems modelling, where it provides a way to decompose the resources used by components of a system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Concurrency (computer science)</span> Ability to execute a task in a non-serial manner

In computer science, concurrency is the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the outcome. This allows for parallel execution of the concurrent units, which can significantly improve overall speed of the execution in multi-processor and multi-core systems. In more technical terms, concurrency refers to the decomposability of a program, algorithm, or problem into order-independent or partially-ordered components or units of computation.

The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats an actor as the basic building block of concurrent computation. In response to a message it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received. Actors may modify their own private state, but can only affect each other indirectly through messaging.

In computer science, the Actor model and process calculi are two closely related approaches to the modelling of concurrent digital computation. See Actor model and process calculi history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon Plotkin</span> Computer Scientist

Gordon David Plotkin, is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and his work on denotational semantics. In particular, his notes on A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics were very influential. He has contributed to many other areas of computer science.

John Charles Reynolds was an American computer scientist.

The actor model and process calculi share an interesting history and co-evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Programming language theory</span> Branch of computer science

Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of formal languages known as programming languages. Programming language theory is closely related to other fields including mathematics, software engineering, and linguistics. There are a number of academic conferences and journals in the area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Vickers (computer scientist)</span>

Steve Vickers is a British mathematician and computer scientist. In the early 1980s, he wrote ROM firmware and manuals for three home computers, the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, and Jupiter Ace. The latter was produced by Jupiter Cantab, a short-lived company Vickers formed together with Richard Altwasser, after the two had left Sinclair Research. Since the late 1980s, Vickers has been an academic in the field of geometric logic, writing over 30 papers in scholarly journals on mathematical aspects of computer science. His book Topology via Logic has been influential over a range of fields. In October 2018, he retired as senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham. As announced on his university homepage, he continues to supervise PhD students at the university and focus on his research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Hewitt</span> American computer scientist; Planner programming languagedesigner (1944-2023)

Carl Eddie Hewitt was an American computer scientist who designed the Planner programming language for automated planning and the actor model of concurrent computation, which have been influential in the development of logic, functional and object-oriented programming. Planner was the first programming language based on procedural plans invoked using pattern-directed invocation from assertions and goals. The actor model influenced the development of the Scheme programming language, the π-calculus, and served as an inspiration for several other programming languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Henson</span> English computer scientist

Professor Martin C. Henson FBCS FRSA is an English computer scientist based at the University of Essex. He is dean for international affairs and is affiliated to the School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering. Henson was head of the department of computer science from 2000 to 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bob Coecke</span>

Bob Coecke is a Belgian theoretical physicist and logician who was professor of Quantum foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University until 2020, when he became Chief Scientist of Cambridge Quantum Computing, and after the merger with Honeywell Quantum Systems, Chief Scientist of Quantinuum. In January 2023 he also became Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He pioneered categorical quantum mechanics, Quantum Picturalism, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat model for natural language, and quantum natural language processing (QNLP). He is a founder of the Quantum Physics and Logic community and conference series, and of the applied category theory community, conference series, and diamond-open-access journal Compositionality.

Nissim Francez is an Israeli professor, emeritus in the computer science faculty at the Technion, and former head of computational linguistics laboratory in the faculty.

Krzysztof R. Apt is a Polish computer scientist. He defended his PhD in mathematical logic in Warsaw, Poland in 1974. His research interests include program correctness and semantics, use of logic as a programming language, distributed computing, and game theory. Besides his own research, he has been heavily involved in service to the computing community, notably by promoting the use of logic in computer science and by advocating open access to scientific literature.

References

  1. 1 2 "Matthew Hennessy". Academy of Europe . Retrieved 17 November 2014.
  2. "Matthew Hennessy". Archive.org . UK: University of Sussex. 3 December 2008. Archived from the original on 3 December 2008. Retrieved 17 November 2014.
  3. Matthew Hennessy at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg .
  4. Gunter, Carl A. (March 1990). "Reviewed Work: Algebraic Theory of Processes by Matthew Hennessy". Journal of Symbolic Logic. 55 (1): 366–368. doi:10.2307/2275000. JSTOR   2275000. S2CID   117105841.