Prakash Panangaden’s research career has spanned computer science, physics and mathematics. He has made seminal contributions to the semantics and logic of probabilistic computation. He has pioneered the use of advanced measure-theoretic methods in modelling and approximating systems with continuous state spaces. This has led to extensive applications in modelling probabilistic systems, in logics for reasoning about quantitative systems and applications to machine learning.
He and his coworkers proved a striking and unexpected theorem relating behavioural equivalence of continuous-state processes to logical properties. An important recent line of work is the development of quantitative equational logic which allows reasoning about approximate equality.
In other work he has shown how to reconstruct the topology of globally hyperbolic spacetimes from their causal structure. In quantum information theory he has developed a formal calculus for reasoning about measurement-based computation; a formalism that has had major impact on reasoning about certain cryptographic protocols.
He has served on several editorial boards, including the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2013 and of the ACM in 2020.
Professional position
- Professor Emeritus, School of Computer Science, McGill University
