Philip Lee Wadler (born April 8, 1956) is a UK-based American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

known for his contributions to

programming language design Programming languages are typically created by designing a form of representation of a computer program, and writing an implementation for the developed concept, usually an interpreter or compiler. Interpreters are designed to read programs, usu ...

and

type theory In mathematics and theoretical computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system. Type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a foundation of ...

. He holds the position of Personal Chair of

theoretical computer science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has contributed to the theory behind

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by Function application, applying and Function composition (computer science), composing Function (computer science), functions. It is a declarat ...

and the use of monads; and the designs of the purely functional language

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell pioneered several programming language ...

and the

XQuery XQuery (XML Query) is a query language and functional programming language designed to query and transform collections of structured and unstructured data, primarily in the form of XML. It also supports text data and, through implementation-sp ...

declarative query language. In 1984, he created the Orwell language. Wadler was involved in adding generic types to

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

5.0. He is also author of "Theorems for free!", a paper that gave rise to much research on functional language optimization (see also Parametricity).

Education

Wadler received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in 1977, and a

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

degree in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

in 1979. He completed his

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. His thesis was entitled "Listlessness is better than laziness" and was supervised by

Nico Habermann Arie Nicolaas Habermann (26 June 1932 – 8 August 1993), often known as A.N. Habermann or Nico Habermann, was a Dutch computer scientist. Habermann was born in Groningen, Netherlands, and earned his B.S. in mathematics and physics and M.S. in ...

Research and career

Wadler's research interests are in

programming languages A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), usually defined by a formal language. Languages usually provide features ...

. Wadler was a

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a p ...

at the Programming Research Group (part of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory) and St Cross College, Oxford during 1983–87. He was progressively lecturer, reader, and professor at the

University of Glasgow The University of Glasgow (abbreviated as ''Glas.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals; ) is a Public university, public research university in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded by papal bull in , it is the List of oldest universities in continuous ...

from 1987 to 1996. Wadler was a member of technical staff at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

Lucent Technologies Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the div ...

(1996–99) and then at

Avaya Avaya LLC(), formerly Avaya Inc., is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey, that provides cloud communications and workstream collaboration services. The company's platform includes unified commun ...

Labs (1999–2003). Since 2003, he has been professor of

in the School of Informatics at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

. Wadler was editor of the '' Journal of Functional Programming'' from 1990 to 2004. Since 2003, Wadler has been a professor of

at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the

and is the chair of theoretical computer science. In 2006, he was working on a new functional language for writing

web applications A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

, called ''Links''. He has supervised many doctoral students to completion. He is also a member of the university's

Blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

Technology Laboratory. Wadler has a h-index of 72 with 26,864 citations at

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

. Since 2018 Wadler has also been a senior research fellow and area leader for programming languages at IOHK (now Input Output Global), the blockchain engineering company developing Cardano. He has contributed to work on Plutus, a

Turing-complete In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a model of computation, a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be ...

smart contract language for Cardano written in Haskell; the UTXO ledger system, native tokens, and

System F System F (also polymorphic lambda calculus or second-order lambda calculus) is a typed lambda calculus that introduces, to simply typed lambda calculus, a mechanism of universal quantification over types. System F formalizes parametric polymorph ...

in Agda.

Awards and honours

In 2003, Wadler was given the award for the most influential paper from ten years earlier by the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. The award cited "Imperative functional programming", a paper written jointly with

Simon Peyton Jones Simon Peyton Jones (born 18 January 1958) is a British computer scientist who researches the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional programming. Education Peyton Jones graduated fro ...

in 1993. In 2005, he was elected

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and Literature, letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". ...

(FRSE). In 2007, he was inducted as a fellow by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

.ACM fellowship award page
/ref> He was elected

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

(FRS) in 2023.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wadler, Philip 1956 births Living people Stanford University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni American computer scientists British computer scientists Members of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford Fellows of St Cross College, Oxford Academics of the University of Glasgow Scientists at Bell Labs Academics of the University of Edinburgh Functional programming Programming language researchers Formal methods people American academic journal editors Computer science writers American textbook writers American male non-fiction writers Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows of the Royal Society 2007 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery American expatriates in the United Kingdom People associated with Cardano