Michael Paul Fourman (born September 12, 1950) is a Professor of Computer Systems at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK. He served as Head of the School of Informatics from 2001 to 2009.
Fourman has worked in areas such as the use of logic in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. His work includes research on formal models of digital systems, system design tools, proof assistants, categorical semantics, and propositional planning.
Qualifications
In 1971, Fourman earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Bristol. In 1972, he received a Master of Science in Mathematical Logic from the University of Oxford. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy thesis titled "Connections between Category Theory and Logic" at Oxford, under the supervision of Dana Scott. He defended his thesis in 1974.
Career
He worked with Scott as an SRC postdoctoral researcher and as a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College in Oxford until 1976. That year, he moved to the United States, first as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. From 1977 to 1982, he served as a JF Ritt Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University in New York.
In 1983, he joined the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Brunel University in the United Kingdom with a Science and Engineering Research Council Fellowship. He later held a Readership position and was appointed to the Chair of Formal Systems at Brunel in 1986.
Fourman was a co-founder and Technical Director of Abstract Hardware Limited (AHL), a company established in 1986. He played a key role in creating the LAMBDA system, a tool designed to help with hardware design. The system was built using the SML programming language and sold by AHL. He left the company in 1997.
In 1988, he joined the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. He was later appointed to the Chair of Computer Systems in the Department of Computer Science. In 1998, he became the founding Head of the Division of Informatics, which later became the School of Informatics. This school combined several departments, including the former Department of Artificial Intelligence, the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, the Centre for Cognitive Science, the Human Communication Research Centre, and the Department of Computer Science.
He has served as Head of the School of Informatics again since August 2002.
He has held visiting positions at universities in Paris (1975), Utrecht (1977, 1980), Cambridge (1979–1980), Sydney (1982), Montreal (1983), and Perth (1994).