Samson Abramsky


Samson Abramsky is a British computer scientist who is a Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He was previously the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2000 to 2021.
Abramsky's early work included contributions to domain theory and the connections thereof with geometric logic. Since then, his work has covered the lazy lambda calculus, strictness analysis, concurrency theory, interaction categories and geometry of interaction, game semantics and quantum computing. Notably, he co-pioneered categorical quantum mechanics. More recently, he has been applying methods from categorical semantics to finite model theory, with applications to descriptive complexity.
WWW cs.ox.ac.uk/samson.abrams...

Education

Abramsky was educated at Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys, Hendon and at King's College, Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London.

Career and research

Since 2021, Abramsky has been Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2004. His research includes the development of game semantics, domain theory in logical form, and categorical quantum mechanics.
His earlier positions include:
Abramsky has played a leading role in the development of game semantics, and its applications to the semantics of programming languages. Other notable contributions include his work on domain theory in logical form, the lazy lambda calculus, strictness analysis, concurrency theory, interaction categories, and geometry of interaction. He has recently been working on high-level methods for quantum computation and information.

Selected publications

Samson Abramsky co-edited 6 Volumes Handbook of Logic in Computer Science with Dov Gabbay and Tom Maibaum:
  • 1992. Volume 1: Background: Mathematical Structures.
  • 1992. Volume 2: Background: Computational Structures.
  • 1995. Volume 3: Semantic Structures.
  • 1995. Volume 4: Semantic Modelling.
  • 2001. Volume 5: Logic and Algebraic Methods.Volume 6: Logical methods in computer science.
Abramsky has published over two hundred publications and his h-index was 57 as of October 2019.
  • 1986. Strictness analysis for higher-order functions.. Science of Computer Programming.
  • 1990. The Lazy Lambda Calculus. Research Topics in Functional Programming.
  • 1993. Computational Interpretations of Linear logic. in Theoretical Computer Science 111
  • 1994. Domain Theory.. in Handbook of Logic in Computer Science 3.
  • 1996. Interaction categories and the foundations of typed concurrent programming.. NATO ASI SERIES F COMPUTER AND SYSTEMS SCIENCES 152
  • 1997. Specifying interaction categories.. Category Theory and Computer Science
  • 2002. Geometry of interaction and linear combinatory algebras.. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 12
  • 2003. Sequentiality vs. concurrency in games and logic. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 13
Some of the later works of Abramsky include:

Awards and honours

Abramsky is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Member of Academia Europaea. He is a member of the editorial boards of the North Holland Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, and of the Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science. He was general chair of LiCS 2000–2003, and is a member of the LiCS Organizing Committee.
Abramsky's nomination for the Royal Society reads: