Professor Bob Coecke
Chief Scientist, Quantinuum Head of Quantum-Compositional Intelligence
In addition to his post as Chief Scientist, Professor Coecke leads Quantinuum’s Oxford-based Quantum-Compositional Intelligence research team. The team’s research efforts include work in Quantum Computational Linguistics (QCL) and its practical implementation, Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP). Bob is Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Emeritus Professor at Wolfson College, Oxford University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Computer Science Department and the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University.
Professor Coecke is a founding member of the Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL) and Applied Category Theory (ACT) communities, the diamond-open-access journal, Compositionality, and the Cambridge University Press, Applied Category Theory book series.
Before Quantinuum
Prior to Quantinuum, Professor Coecke taught "Picturing Quantum Processes" at the Department of Computer Science, Oxford University. In 2011, he became the first to have Quantum Foundations in a professorial title. He jokes that he started the role in 2010, therefore he was also the first professor to be in a superposition.
Coecke co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary research group. He taught at the Free University of Brussels; Imperial College, London; McGill University, Montreal; and Cambridge University. He has been awarded 33 grants, including Flanders Research Foundation, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Leverhulme, EU-STREP, US Office of Naval Research, and US Air Force Office of Scientific Reasearch, including three personal fellowships and the first large European Union grant within the Computer Science Department at Oxford while a post-doctoral student. Professor Coecke currently has a Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and a John Templeton Foundation grant.
Research highlights
Professor Coecke’s papers can be found on Google Scholar.
Published Quantum in Pictures, a secondary school book, with Stefano Gogioso.
With Will Zeng, initiated Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) foundational paper.
With Rob Spekkens and Tobias Fritz, developed mathematical foundations for resource theories.
With Giovanni de Felice, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, and Alexis Toumi, ran the first QNLP implementation on quantum hardware.
With Aleks Kissinger started ZW-calculus as a valuable variation of ZX-calculus.
In a foundational paper, provided a mathematical foundation, DisCoCirc, for how sentences interact in a text to produce the meaning of that text.
Developed ZX-calculus with Ross Duncan as a refinement of CQM. Using CQM, with Mernoosh Sadrzadeh and Steve Clark, developed DisCoCat model of meaning for natural language.
Completed the dodo book, Coecke, Bob, and Aleks Kissinger. Picturing Quantum Processes. Cambridge University Press, 2017. The volume provides a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. Dr. Kissinger is an Associate Professor of Quantum Computation, Oxford University.
Pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (CQM) with Samson Abramsky. Published foundational paper. CQM is now in AMS’s MSC2020 classification.
Books
Professor Coecke has written three books on diagrammatic reasoning. The first, written with former PhD student, Aleks Kissinger, is a university-level text commonly referred to as the dodo book. The second book written by Bob Coecke and Aleks Kissinger, is Picturing Quantum Processes published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. The book is used in the quantum computing course at Oxford, Computer Science.
The third and most recent book, Quantum in Pictures, co-written with former PhD student, Stefano Gogioso, introduces readers of all levels of expertise – from school children, parents and general science enthusiasts to businesspeople and educators – to the central concepts of quantum theory.
Edited volumes:
Career Support
Find Bob’s previous PhD students in Mathematics Geneology.
Professor Coecke does accept new students
In the news
Bob’s work has been covered in various media outlets, including Forbes [1, 2], New Scientist, Physics World, Computer Weekly [1, 2], The Quantum Insider [1, 2, 3]. The Quantum Zeitgeist listed Bob as one of the twenty most influential people in quantum computing.