Samson Abramsky (born 12 March 1953) is a British computer scientist who teaches computer science at University College London. He previously held a special professor position at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2000 to 2021.

Abramsky’s early research focused on domain theory and how it relates to geometric logic. Later, his work included topics such as the lazy lambda calculus, strictness analysis, concurrency theory, interaction categories, geometry of interaction, game semantics, and quantum computing. Notably, he helped start the field of categorical quantum mechanics. Recently, he has used methods from categorical semantics to study finite model theory, which helps explain descriptive complexity.

Education

Abramsky attended Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys in Hendon and King's College, Cambridge, where he earned a BA in 1975, an MA in Philosophy in 1979, and a Diploma in Computer Science. He later studied at Queen Mary, University of London, where he received a PhD in Computer Science in 1988, supervised by Richard Bornat.

Career and research

Since 2021, Samson Abramsky has been a professor of computer science at University College London. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004. His research focuses on developing game semantics, domain theory in logical form, and categorical quantum mechanics.

Before becoming a professor at University College London, Abramsky held several positions, including:
• Programmer at GEC Computers Limited, 1976–1978
• Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Statistics, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), 1980–1983
• Lecturer (1983–1988), Reader (1988–1990), and Professor (1990–1995) at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London
• Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, 1996–2000
• Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at the University of Oxford, 2000–2021

Abramsky has played a major role in developing game semantics and its use in explaining programming languages. Other important contributions include work on domain theory in logical form, the lazy lambda calculus, strictness analysis, concurrency theory, interaction categories, and geometry of interaction. Recently, he has focused on methods for quantum computation and information.

Samson Abramsky co-edited six volumes of the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science with Dov Gabbay and Tom Maibaum:
• 1992. Volume 1: Background: Mathematical Structures
• 1992. Volume 2: Background: Computational Structures
• 1995. Volume 3: Semantic Structures
• 1995. Volume 4: Semantic Modelling
• 2001. Volume 5: Logic and Algebraic Methods
• 2006. Volume 6: Logical Methods in Computer Science

Abramsky has written over 200 publications. His h-index was 57 as of October 2019.

Some of his early publications include:
• 1986. Strictness Analysis for Higher-Order Functions (with G.L. Burn and C. Hankin). Science of Computer Programming
• 1990. The Lazy Lambda Calculus. Research Topics in Functional Programming
• 1993. Computational Interpretations of Linear Logic. Theoretical Computer Science 111
• 1994. Domain Theory (with A. Jung). Handbook of Logic in Computer Science 3
• 1996. Interaction Categories and the Foundations of Typed Concurrent Programming (with S. Gay and R. Nagarajan). NATO ASI SERIES F Computer and Systems Sciences 152
• 1997. Specifying Interaction Categories (with D. Pavlović). Category Theory and Computer Science
• 2002. Geometry of Interaction and Linear Combinatory Algebras (with E. Haghverdi and P. Scott). Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 12 (5)
• 2003. Sequentiality vs. Concurrency in Games and Logic. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 13 (4)

Some of Abramsky’s later works include:
• 2010. Introduction to Categories and Categorical Logic (with N. Tzevelekos). In New Structures for Physics. Springer
• 2012. Logical Bell Inequalities (with Lucien Hardy). In Physical Review A. Vol. 85, No. ARTN 062114
• 2013. Robust Constraint Satisfaction and Local Hidden Variables in Quantum Mechanics (with G. Gottlob and P. Kolaitis). IJCAI

Awards and honours

Abramsky became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2000, and a Member of Academia Europaea in 1993. He serves on the editorial boards of the North Holland Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics and the Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science. He served as general chair of LiCS from 2000 to 2003 and is a member of the LiCS Organizing Committee.

• He received the EATCS Award in 2024. This award honors long-term contributions to theoretical computer science. His work includes contributions to domain theory, game semantics, and the categorical approach to quantum computation and information.
• He was elected a Fellow of the ACM in 2014 for contributions to domains in logical form, game semantics, categorical quantum mechanics, and contextual semantics.
• He was awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in 2013.
• Three of his papers received the LiCS Test-of-Time Award (a 20-year retrospective):
• Samson Abramsky, "Domain theory in Logical Form" (1987). The award was presented at LiCS 2007.
• Samson Abramsky, Kohei Honda, and Guy McCusker, "A Fully Abstract Game Semantics for General References" (1998). The award was presented at LiCS 2018.
• Samson Abramsky and Bob Coecke, "A categorical semantics of quantum protocols" (2004). The award was presented at LiCS 2024.
• He received an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship on Foundational Structures and Methods for Quantum Informatics in 2007.
• Fellow of the Royal Society (2004)
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2000)

Abramsky's nomination for the Royal Society reads: