Philip Wadler

Philip is a researcher at Avaya Labs. He likes to introduce theory into practice, and practice into theory. An example of the former is GJ, the basis for Sun's new version of Java with generics, which derives from quantifiers in second-order logic. An example of the latter is Featherweight Java, a simplification of Java comparable in power and simplicity to lambda calculus (the theory underlying functional languages). Phil is a principal designer of the Haskell programming language, and he co- authored Introduction to Functional Programming , which has been translated into Dutch, German, and Japanese.

In previous incarnations, Phil has worked or studied at Bell Labs, Glasgow, Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, Xerox Parc, and Stanford, and has served as guest professor in Sydney and Copenhagen. He edits the Journal of Functional Programming for Cambridge University Press and has been invited to give talks all around the world.

Phil is an editor of the working drafts of W3C's XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics [XQ-FS] and XML Schema: Formal Description , two efforts to shine the light of mathematics into the murk of industrial standards.