Informatics Departmental Seminar: Professor Samson Abramsky

Join us for our upcoming lecture with Professor Samson Abramsky.

Talk: The Logic of Quantum Paradoxes

Abstract: It is often, and justifiably, said that quantum mechanics is our most successful physical theory. At the same time, fundamental features of quantum mechanics lead to the borders of paradox, and rule out any reconciliation with the world-view of classical physics. Moreover, it is these very paradoxical and non-classical features which lie at the heart of quantum advantage in information processing and computational tasks.
In this talk, we will explain the logical structure of these non-classical and paradoxical features. They will appear as ``'logical twisting’, so that e.g. Liar cycles correspond to Moebius strips, and describe non-local physical phenomena. We find a meeting point of Logic, Topology, Probability, and Physics.

Speaker Bio: Samson Abramsky is a Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He has previously held chairs at Imperial College, the University of Edinburgh, and Oxford University. He has made extensive contributions to the logic and semantics of computation. Over the past two decades, a major focus of his work has been the mathematical foundations of quantum computation. His contributions include his pioneering work on domain theory in logical form, game semantics, categorical quantum mechanics, the sheaftheoretic foundations of contextuality, and game comonads. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Member of Academia Europaea, and Fellow of the ACM. He has received the EATCSAward, the Lovelace award, the Alonzo Church award, and three LiCS Test-of-Time awards. A volume of the Springer Outstanding Contributions to Logic series dedicated to his work appeared in 2023.

How to join online?

Please email informatics-research@kcl.ac.uk to get the MS Teams link.