Bob Coecke

Bob Coecke (born 23 July 1968) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and logician who was professor of Quantum foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University until 2020, when he became Chief Scientist of Cambridge Quantum Computing, and after the merger with Honeywell Quantum Systems, Chief Scientist of Quantinuum. In January 2023 he also became Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He pioneered categorical quantum mechanics (entry 18M40 in Mathematics Subject Classification 2020), Quantum Picturalism, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat model for natural language, and quantum natural language processing (QNLP). He is a founder of the Quantum Physics and Logic community and conference series, and of the applied category theory community, conference series, and diamond-open-access journal Compositionality.

Coecke is also a composer and musician, who retrospectively has been called a pioneer of industrial music, and Coecke is also one of the pioneers of employing quantum computers in music.