Christopher Strachey

Christopher Strachey (1916 to 1975) was an English computer scientist and mathematician who helped give programming languages a mathematical footing. Born in Hampstead into the Strachey family, he studied mathematics and physics at King's College, Cambridge, worked on radar as a research physicist during the Second World War, and taught at St Edmund's School, Canterbury, and Harrow School before moving into computing in 1951. His early programs for the Pilot ACE and the Ferranti Mark I included a draughts player and a love letter generator. He was the chief architect of the Combined Programming Language, CPL, and his lecture notes Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages set out ideas such as the distinction between L-values and R-values. In collaboration with Dana Scott he founded denotational semantics, which assigns mathematical meanings to programs. In 1965 he founded the Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford and became its first professor of computer science. He died in Oxford in 1975.