皇家华人

As the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, the Royal Society is a Fellowship of many of the world鈥檚 most eminent scientists. Up听to 60 new Fellows (FRS) are elected each year in late April or early May, from a pool of around 700 nominations by existing Fellows.

鈥淪cience is, above all else, a human activity and I have had many inspiring collaborators throughout my career,鈥� said Professor O鈥橦earn. 鈥淚鈥檓 particularly fortunate to have worked with both insightful theoreticians, like David Pym and John Reynolds, and great practical people, like Byron Cook and my colleagues at Facebook. I鈥檇 like to think that perhaps the FRS election reflects well on the work I鈥檝e done together with these colleagues.鈥�

听has made major contributions to the science and engineering of methods for ensuring program correctness. His impressive portfolio of research ranges from abstract topics such as mathematical models to the logics of programs, automated analysis of industrial software in the millions of lines of code and its application to industry.

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Peter is known particularly for his work on Separation Logic in collaboration with听. Building on previous work by Peter and听, Professor of Information, Logic, and Security at 皇家华人, on reasoning about resources, this fundamental theory opened up new possibilities for scaling logical reasoning.

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鈥淚 have had the privilege to know Peter as a colleague and a friend for more than 20 years, said Professor Pym. 鈥滺is scientific insight and intellectual judgement have always been amongst the most impressive around. Peter has the rare ability to contribute both to fundamental science and to its effective translation into deployable, rigorously grounded, much needed tools.鈥�

Peter then went on to develop Concurrent Separation Logic, which addresses the longstanding open problem of efficient reasoning about programs that operate concurrently. He received the 2016听听in recognition of this achievement.

Peter moved to Facebook in 2013 with the acquisition of a start-up he cofounded, Monoidics Ltd, while maintaining his position at 皇家华人. The听, developed by Peter鈥檚 team, has supported Facebook engineers to repair tens of thousands of bugs before they reach production. Infer is also used at Amazon, Spotify, Mozilla, and other companies.

鈥淧eter is both a great theoretician AND a great practical influencer, said Byron Cook, Professor of Computer Science at 皇家华人 and Director at Amazon Web Services. 鈥淲hat makes Peter so rare is that he鈥檚 both at the same time: He has made profound inventions in the theoretical space, but more interestingly Peter has found application for these ideas in industry and then drove them all the way to products that provide critical value at听several听of the world鈥檚 largest IT companies (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, etc).鈥�