Welcome to The Centre for Fundamental Computer Science

Fundamental Computer Science has always been one of the core strengths of Queen Mary’s work in the area.This dates back to the  in the 1960’s and the appointment of the famous computer scientist Peter Landin who was the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, which proved essential to the development of functional programming.

Our vision is that research into the core principles of both logic and mathematical modelling techniques leads to structural advances in practical capabilities. We have pioneered numerous developments that illustrate this, running from Landin’s work on the basics of Functional Programming, through O’Hearn and Pym’s work on substructural logic that led to the first use of verification at scale in industrial code-bases, Honda’s work on the structure of interactions that leads to session types, Malacaria’s work on structural information flow.

More recently we have worked on applications in security, computer video and sensor networks, and on the theory of information and probabilistic reasoning.