Professor Philip Wadler FRS

Philip Wadler likes to introduce theory into practice and practice into theory. Theory into practice: his work adding generics to Java derives from quantifiers in second-order logic. Practice into theory: Featherweight Java specifies the core of Java in less than one page of rules. He is a principal designer of the Haskell programming language, contributing to its two main innovations, type classes and monads.

Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Research Fellow at IOHK. He is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and past chair of ACM SIGPLAN. He is a recipient of the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award and the POPL Most Influential Paper Award. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, Carnegie-Mellon University, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, Paris, and Rio de Janiero. He is co-author of four textbooks and has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.