Biography: Philip Wadler

Philip Wadler likes to introduce theory into practice, and practice into theory. An example of theory into practice: GJ, the basis for Java with generics, derives from quantifiers in second-order logic. An example of practice into theory: Featherweight Java specifies the core of Java in less than one page of rules. He is a principal designer of the Haskell programming language, contributing to its two main innovations, type classes and monads. Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship, and currently serves as Chair of ACM SIGPLAN. Previously, he worked or studied at Avaya Labs, Bell Labs, Glasgow, Chalmers, Oxford, CMU, Xerox Parc, and Stanford, and visited as a guest professor in Paris, Sydney, and Copenhagen. He has an h-index of 47 and is a winner of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award. He contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is a co-author of XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004) and Generics and Collections in Java (O'Reilly, 2006). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.