Bob Coecke was born on July 23, 1968. He is a Belgian scientist who studies physics and logic. He works as Chief Scientist at a company called Quantinuum, which focuses on quantum computing. Before 2020, he was a professor at Oxford University, teaching about quantum foundations, logic, and structures. He also holds a special research position at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Coecke helped develop several important ideas in science, including categorical quantum mechanics, Quantum Picturalism, the ZX-calculus, the DisCoCat model for natural language, quantum natural language processing (QNLP), and quantum education through his book Quantum in Pictures. He started the Quantum Physics and Logic community, the Applied Category Theory communities and conferences, and the journal Compositionality.

In addition to his scientific work, Coecke is a composer and musician. He is known as a pioneer of industrial music. He also helped introduce the use of quantum computers in music.

Education and career

Coecke earned his doctorate in sciences from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1996. He later worked as a postdoctoral researcher in several places, including the Theoretical Physics Group at Imperial College, London; the Category Theory Group in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at McGill University in Montreal; the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University; and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.

He was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science. In 2007, he became a Lecturer in Quantum Computer Science there. Alongside Samson Abramsky, he helped create and lead the Quantum Group. In July 2011, he was named professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University, with the title effective from October 2010. He was also a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, starting in 2007. He is now an Emeritus Fellow there.

In January 2019, Coecke became Senior Scientific Advisor at Cambridge Quantum Computing. In January 2021, he left his professorship at Oxford to join Cambridge Quantum Computing as Chief Scientist. After Cambridge Quantum Computing merged with Honeywell Quantum Systems, he continued as Chief Scientist of the combined company, Quantinuum.

In January 2023, he also became Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Work

Coecke's research focuses on the basic principles of physics, especially category theory, logic, and visual reasoning. His work applies to areas like quantum informatics, quantum gravity, and natural language processing. He helped develop categorical quantum mechanics with Samson Abramsky and created a visual method for quantum processes based on Penrose graphical notation. He wrote a textbook called Picturing Quantum Processes with Aleks Kissinger. With Ross Duncan, he developed the ZX-calculus. He also helped create the DisCoCat model for natural language with Stephen Clark and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh. Additionally, he worked on quantum natural language processing (QNLP) with Will Zeng and colleagues at Cambridge Quantum Computing.

Coecke's work on using categorical quantum mechanics for natural language processing in computational linguistics was highlighted in New Scientist in December 2010. His research on quantum natural language processing was featured in Quantum Daily in December 2020 and in PhysicsWorld in January 2021.

Music

Coecke is also a musician who has performed and recorded music since the 1980s. Later, he was recognized as a pioneer of industrial music. His band, Black Tish, used advanced sampling methods, a variety of synthesizers, sound loops, and guitars similar to those in metal music to create a unique mix of heavy rock and electronic music. This style connected the experimental sounds of bands like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten with the more radio-friendly styles of bands like Ministry or Nine Inch Nails.

Coecke is also one of the first people to use quantum computers in music.

Selected publications

• Bob Coecke, Aleks Kissinger: Picturing Quantum Processes. A First Course in Quantum Theory and Diagrammatic Reasoning, Cambridge University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1316219317
• Bob Coecke, Stefano Gogioso: Quantum in Pictures, Quantinuum, 2022, ISBN 978-1-7392147-1-5

• Bob Coecke, David Moore, Alexander Wilce (edited by): Current Research in Operational Quantum Logic: Algebras, Categories, Languages, Fundamental Theories of Physics, Kluwer Academic, 2010, ISBN 978-9048154371
• Bob Coecke (edited by): New Structures for Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 813, Springer, 2011, ISBN 978-3642128202

• Bob Coecke: Kindergarten quantum mechanics, arXiv:quant-ph/0510032
• Samson Abramsky, Bob Coecke: A categorical semantics of quantum protocols, Proceedings of the 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 2004, pp. 415–425
• Bob Coecke, Ross Duncan: Interacting quantum observables, Automata, Languages and Programming, pp. 298–310, 2008
• Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Alexis Toumi, Giovanni de Felice, Bob Coecke: Grammar-Aware Question-Answering on Quantum Computers, arXiv:2012.03756
• Bob Coecke: The Mathematics of Text Structure, arXiv:1904.03478
• Will Zeng, Bob Coecke: Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Natural Language Processing, arXiv:1608.01406
• Bob Coecke, Tobias Fritz, Robert Spekkens: A mathematical theory of resources, arXiv:1409.5531
• Bob Coecke: An Alternative Gospel of structure: order, composition, processes, arxiv:1307.4038
• Bob Coecke, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Steven Clark: Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning, arXiv:1003.4394
• Bob Coecke: Quantum Picturalism, arXiv:0908.1787

• Eduardo Reck Miranda, Richie Yeung, Anna Pearson, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Bob Coecke: A quantum natural language processing approach to musical intelligence, arXiv:2111.06741
• Dimitri Kartsaklis, Ian Fan, Richie Yeung, Anna Pearson, Robin Lorenz, Alexis Toumi, Giovanni de Felice, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Stephen Clark, Bob Coecke: lambeq: An efficient high-level python library for quantum NLP, arXiv:2110.04236
• Giovanni de Felice, Alexis Toumi, Bob Coecke: Discopy: monoidal categories in Python, arXiv:2111.06741