Bob Coecke

Professor Bob Coecke

Visiting Fellow

Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College

E: bob.coecke (a) quantinuum.com

T: +44 7881 333990

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Interests

I was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures 2011-2021, Lecturer of Quantum Computer Science 2007-2011, EPSRC Advenced Research Fellow 2004-2009, Postdoc 2001-2003, and created and headed the Quantum Group, here at the Department of Computer Science. My main affiliation is now Quantinuum, where I am Chief Scientist and lead the Oxford-based Quantum-Compositional Intelligence team, and am also a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I am still active at the university, where I mainly teach, supervise and mentor, here at the Department of Computer Science and also at the Mathematical Institute. At Wolfson College, where I am Emeritus Fellow, I lead the Quantum Foundations Research Cluster. At Oxford's Department of Computer Science, I subversively obtained the 1st ever large EU grant in 2006, ignoring an embargo by the head administrator, paving the way for many others to obtain EU grants, and I also take pride in taking the lead in some more necessary rebelions.

Below is a brief bio and here is my Quantinuum webpage with a more detailed bio.

You can contact me by email at bob [.] coecke [@] quantinuum [.] com

My courses:

I am teaching Classical and Quantum Compositional Distributional Meaning in Hilary
I am co-teaching Introduction to Quantum Information in Hilary with Artur Ekert where I cover ZX-calculus - lecture notes
I co-created Quantum Processes and Computation with Aleks Kissinger and covers our book Picturing Quantum Processes

Biography

I am Chief Scientist at Quantinuum, head Quantinuum's Oxford-based Quantum NLP & Compositional Intelligence sub-team, I am Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, I am Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at the Computer Science Department and the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. Previously I was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, where I was 20 years, and co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary Quantum Group that grew to 50 members and I supervised close to 70 PhD students. I am still supervising, at Oxford and elsewhere, and also still teach at Oxford's Mathematical Institute. I pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS's MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and DisCoCirc natural language meaning. I co-authored Picturing Quantum Processes, with Aleks Kissinger, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. I co-authored Quantum in Pictures, with Stefano Gogioso, which does the same, but now accessible to people with no maths background. I co-authored some 200 research papers. I obtained approx. 35 grants, including from NFWO, EPSRC, Leverhulme, EU, ONR, AFOSR, FQXi, JTF. I still hold grants with the latter two. I am a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, of the diamond-open-access journal Compositionality, and Cambridge University Press' Applied Category Theory book series. I was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his academic title. My work has been headlined by various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly.