LEADING DESIGNER OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES TO SPEAK AT BARD COLLEGE ON THURSDAY, APRIL 10 The Distinguished scientist Lecture Series Presents Dr. Philip Wadler

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Thursday, April 10, the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series at Bard College will present Dr. Philip Wadler, a researcher at Avaya Labs in New Jersey and a leading designer of computer programming languages. His talk, "As Natural as 0, 1, 2," is free and open to the public and takes place at 7:30 p.m. in the multipurpose room of the Bertelsmann Campus Center. Refreshments will be served after the lecture.

In his talk, Wadler will examine how laws of reason suggest a natural programming language, known as lambda calculus. The language is in exact correspondence with a formulation of the laws of reason, called natural deduction. Lambda calculus and natural deduction were devised, independently of each other, around 1930, just before the development of the first stored program computer. Yet the correspondence between them was not recognized until decades later, and not published until 1980. Today, languages based on lambda calculus have a few thousand users. Tomorrow, reliable use of the Internet may depend on languages with logical foundations.

In addition to his position at Avaya, Wadler is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Functional Programming. Prior to Avaya, Wadler worked for Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies; was a professor at the University of Glasgow; and was a visiting research fellow at Oxford University. In addition, he has published numerous professional papers in a range of journals and has lectured extensively across the United States and abroad. He is the coauthor of the book, Introduction to Functional Programming, a widely used textbook in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia that has also been translated into German, Dutch, and Japanese. He has a Ph.D. and an M.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University and B.S. from Stanford University.

For more information on the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series, call 845-758-7581.

(3.13.03)

This event was last updated on 03-24-2003

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