Dear all,

I am very saddened to hear of Phil's passing. Phil was one of my PhD advisors at the University of Ottawa from 2015-2020 (along with Pieter Hofstra, who also sadly passed away in 2022). He was an extremely kind and supportive mentor in mathematics and in life. I also knew him to be a very caring and conscientious teacher, from when I served as a teaching assistant for his discrete mathematics course (on more than one occasion), and from when I took a graduate course with him on categorical logic.

I last saw him in person when I had a post-PhD-defense celebratory dinner at the Green Door restaurant in Ottawa (one of his favourites!), and in recent years I had seen him at various online seminars and conferences. I last spoke to him over e-mail in October, not knowing that that would be the last time we would speak.

May he rest in peace.

-Jason Parker

On Tue, Dec 19, 2023 at 6:36 AM Richard Blute <rblute@uottawa.ca> wrote:

It is with great sadness that we convey the news to the category theory community that our good friend and colleague Phil Scott passed away this morning (18^th December, 2023) after a long battle with cancer.

Phil’s many contributions to category theory are well known. Phil and Jim Lambek essentially invented the field of categorical proof theory with a series of papers that culminated in the book “Introduction To Higher-Order Categorical Logic”, which is still the standard text on the subject. Phil’s research went well beyond these initial works: he made major contributions to theoretical computer science, linear logic, inverse semigroup theory and recursion theory.

Those of us who knew him personally will always think of him as a mentor, a friend and a genuinely kind soul.

Rick Blute

Robin Cockett

Simon Henry

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