Re: Phil Scott

[Peter Selinger <Peter.Selinger@Dal.Ca>]

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Phil was a great friend and mentor to me, and I am very sad to hear of his passing. Although I must have met Phil a year earlier, my first memory of him is in 1995 at the Newton Institute in Cambridge, when I was still a graduate student and there was a special term on Semantics of Computation. Later, he hired me at the University of Ottawa and showed me the ropes of everything, including applying for my first NSERC grant (Phil had just finished a term as the chair of the NSERC review committee in computer science for all of Canada), how to teach (I still use some of the course materials I got from him), how to organize a conference (LICS 2004), how to supervise graduate students, and how to navigate university politics. Many others have already described Phil as a friend and mentor, and he certainly was both to me in more ways than I can describe. He also knew every restaurant in Ottawa, although we ended up going to his favorite restaurant, the Green Door, more often than not. Phil and Marcia also loved to visit Halifax and have been here on many occasions, including a memorable visit to a live butterfly exhibit at the Natural History Museum when my kids were small.

Phil was always unassuming and friendly and never put on airs. I will miss him very dearly.

-- Peter

________________________________
From: Richard Blute <rblute@uottawa.ca>
Sent: December 19, 2023 12:10 AM
To: Categories mailing list <categories@mq.edu.au>
Subject: Phil Scott




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 (18th 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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