Philip Wadler facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Phil Wadler
FRS FRSE
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Wadler before a lecture at the University of Edinburgh
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Philip Lee Wadler
April 8, 1956 |
| Citizenship | American |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science, programming languages |
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| Thesis | Listlessness is Better than Laziness: An Algorithm that Transforms Applicative Programs to Eliminate Intermediate Lists (1984) |
| Doctoral advisor | Nico Habermann |
Philip Lee Wadler (born April 8, 1956) is an American computer scientist who lives in the UK. He is famous for his work on how computer languages are designed. He also studies how these languages use "types," which are like rules for data.
He teaches theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh. Wadler has helped create important ideas for a way of programming called functional programming. He also helped design programming languages like Haskell and XQuery. In 1984, he even made his own language called Orwell. He played a part in adding "generic types" to Java 5.0. This made Java more flexible. He also wrote a famous paper called "Theorems for free!" This paper led to new ways to make functional programs run faster.
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Learning About Computers
Phil Wadler went to Stanford University and earned a degree in mathematics in 1977. He then studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his master's degree in 1979.
In 1984, he completed his PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. His main project was called "Listlessness is better than laziness." His teacher for this project was Nico Habermann.
Working with Programming Languages
Phil Wadler is very interested in how computer languages work. From 1983 to 1987, he was a researcher at Oxford University. He then taught at the University of Glasgow from 1987 to 1996.
After that, he worked at big technology companies like Bell Labs and Avaya Labs. Since 2003, he has been a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He leads the theoretical computer science department there.
Creating New Ways to Code
Since 2003, Wadler has been a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is the head of theoretical computer science. In 2006, he worked on a new functional language called Links. This language was designed for building web applications. He has also guided many students through their PhD studies.
Wadler is also part of the university's Blockchain Technology Laboratory. He has published many important papers. His work has been cited by other researchers over 26,000 times.
Since 2018, Wadler has also been a senior researcher at IOHK. This company develops Cardano, a type of blockchain. He has helped with "Plutus," which is a smart contract language for Cardano. Smart contracts are like digital agreements that run automatically. Plutus is written in Haskell. He also helped with other parts of Cardano, like its ledger system and "native tokens."
Awards and Special Recognitions
In 2003, Phil Wadler received an award for a very important paper he wrote ten years earlier. The paper was called "Imperative functional programming." He wrote it with Simon Peyton Jones in 1993.
In 2005, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE). This is a special honor given to top experts in Scotland. In 2007, he was recognized as a fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery. This is a major award for computer scientists. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), which is one of the oldest and most respected scientific honors in the world.
