- I am a Research Associate at the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh.
- I am, together with my colleagues Chris Heunen, Robin Kaarsgaard, Malin Altenmüller, Alex Rice and 方望 (Fang Wang), a member of the project EPSRC Rubber DUQ: Flexible Dynamic Universal Quantum programming.
- Before this, I was a PhD student at LMF in Université Paris-Saclay under the supervision of Benoît Valiron and Vladimir Zamdzhiev.
- You can find my CV here. I'll try to update it as regularly as possible.
Contact
For research or teaching purposes, don't hesitate to get in touch with me at: louis (dot) lemonnier (at) ed (dot) ac (dot) uk.
I am also on Mastodon! 🐘
Defence
I defended my PhD on 19th June 2024. My thesis, The Semantics of Effects: Centrality, Quantum Control and Reversible Recursion, is available on my webpage, on the arXiv and on the official French website theses.fr. My slides are here.
Research
My research lies at the intersection between mathematics, computer science and quantum theory.
My main focus resides on the semantics of quantum programming languages; in other words, I provide an interpretation of programs using techniques from logic and mathematics, in particular topology and category theory. One of my goals is to abstract quantum programming from the level of circuits to infinite data types.
My interest in quantum computing has also led me to work on reversible programming languages and the semantics of effects.
Developing the semantics of a programming language enhances one's understanding of this language, and it can sometimes highlight which aspects of the language can be improved. Moreover, semantics offers a formal setting for a type-safe verified compilation of a (high-level) language to hardware.
More generally, there are several topics that I have worked on, would like to work on or that I enjoy reading about:
- any model or mathematical structure used in quantum computation, with a special spark for category theory, and I could not live without this,
- quantum physics,
- graphical calculi, especially ZX and ZH-calculus, in which the recent trend is the study of infinite dimensions, which I approve,
- type theory (I want to finish reading HoTT at some point),
- topology.
Preprints and Publications
Non-Cartesian Guarded Recursion with Daggers.
Preprint.
arXiv:2409.14591.
Co-authored with Kostia Chardonnet and Benoît Valiron.
Semantics for a Turing-complete Reversible Programming Language with Inductive Types.
FSCD'24.
arXiv:2309.12151.
DOI.
Co-authored with Titouan Carette and Vladimir Zamdzhiev.
Central Submonads and Notions of Computation: Soundness, Completeness and Internal Languages.
LICS'23.
arXiv:2207.09190.
DOI.
Co-authored with Titouan Carette.
Large-scale quantum diagrammatic reasoning tools, !-boxes vs. scalable notations.
Preprint.
arXiv:2204.11702.
Co-authored with Kostia Chardonnet and Benoît Valiron.
Categorical Semantics of Reversible Pattern-Matching.
MFPS'21.
arXiv:2109.05837.
DOI.
Co-authored with John van de Wetering and Aleks Kissinger.
Hypergraph Simplification: Linking the Path-sum Approach to the ZH-calculus.
QPL'20.
arXiv:2003.13564.
DOI.
Teaching
2024-2025 (University of Edinburgh):
- PL Foundations in Agda, tutorials and guest lecture. Webpage.
- Quantum Programming and Semantics, tutorials and guest lecture.
2023-2024 (ENS Paris-Saclay):
- Discrete mathematics, tutorials.
- Programming and semantics, tutorials. My resources (in French).
2022-2023 (ENS Paris-Saclay):
- Project: Functional programming and Go compiler in OCaml.
- Computability, tutorials. My resources (in French).
- Programming and semantics, tutorials. My resources (in French).
2021-2022 (ENS Paris-Saclay):
- Project: Go compiler in OCaml.
- Programming and semantics, tutorials. My resources (in French).
- Another project: webpage.
Other interests
To contact me about anything in this section: llemonnier (at) crans (dot) org.
Outside mathematics and computer science, I spend a lot of time learning about natural and constructed languages. I have never focused my full attention on one in particular. Thus, I have medium knowledge in many languages, and I speak a few of them. My goal is to eventually create a language I am proud of, which will take a while.
I also play the bass when I find the time.
Pointers
Some colleagues and friends, who are not already cited above.