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Luca Cardelli

Luca Cardelli.jpg
Born
Luca Andrea Cardelli

Montecatini Terme, Italy
Alma mater University of Pisa
University of Edinburgh (PhD)
Known for Theory of Objects
Awards Dahl–Nygaard Prize (2007)
ACM Fellow (2005)
Scientific career
Fields Theory of programming languages
Process algebra
Systems biology
Molecular Programming
Institutions Bell Labs
Microsoft Research
Digital Equipment Corporation
University of Edinburgh
University of Oxford
Thesis An algebraic approach to hardware description and verification (1982)
Doctoral advisor Gordon Plotkin

Luca Andrea Cardelli is a famous Italian computer scientist. He works as a research professor at the University of Oxford in the UK. He is known for his important work in type theory, which helps make computer programs reliable. He also worked on operational semantics, which is about how computer programs actually run.

Luca Cardelli helped create the programming language Modula-3. He also built the first compiler for the ML language. A compiler turns code written by people into instructions computers can understand. He also helped develop an experimental language called Polyphonic C#.

Early Life and Education

Luca Cardelli was born in Montecatini Terme, Italy. He studied at the University of Pisa. Later, he earned his PhD (a high-level university degree) from the University of Edinburgh in 1982. His research there was guided by Gordon Plotkin.

Career and Contributions

Before joining the University of Oxford in 2014, Luca Cardelli worked at several big companies. From 1997, he worked for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. Before that, he worked at Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corporation. He even helped with Unix software, including a program called vismon.

Awards and Recognition

Luca Cardelli has received many important awards for his work. In 2004, he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. This means he was recognized as a top expert in computer science. In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). This is a very old and respected group of scientists in the UK. In 2007, he won the Senior AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize. This award is named after two famous computer scientists, Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard.

Fun Fact

In the late 1980s, while working at DEC, Luca Cardelli created a special computer font. It was called the Dijkstra font. This font was designed to look like the handwriting of another famous computer scientist, Edsger W. Dijkstra.

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