13 Facts About Jose Meseguer

Jose Meseguer leads the university's Formal Methods and Declarative Languages Laboratory.

Jose Meseguer obtained his PhD in mathematics in 1975 with a thesis titled Primitive recursion in model categories under Michael Pfender at the University of Zaragoza, after which he did post-doctoral work at the University of Santiago de Compostela and the University of California at Berkeley.

Jose Meseguer joined the University of Illinois in 2001 and currently is Professor of Computer Science, where he leads their Formal Methods and Declarative Languages Laboratory.

Jose Meseguer has worked particularly on the design and implementation of declarative languages, including OBJ and Maude, as well as rewriting logic.

Jose Meseguer was awarded the 2019 Formal Methods Europe Fellowship.

Jose Meseguer's work is characterised by innovation, conceptual elegance, and rigor, combined with practical applicability.

Jose Meseguer is known for his seminal research on algebraic specification, concurrency, rewriting, logic, and computer security.

Jose Meseguer has worked on the design and implementation of several declarative languages, including OBJ and Maude, on formal specification and verification techniques, on concurrency theory, on formal approaches to object-oriented specification, on parallel software and architectures for declarative languages, and on the logical foundations of Computer Science using equational logic, rewriting logic, and the theory of general logics.

Jose Meseguer is the inventor of rewriting logic and the main developer of Maude.

Jose Meseguer has made fundamental contributions to the formal analysis of distributed systems, combining state-based and action-based reasoning in temporal logic; combining rewriting with SMT solving; and providing theory-generic SMT solving algorithms that can be applied not only to fixed predefined theories, but to any theory that satisfies certain properties.

Jose Meseguer is not afraid of venturing into domains far away from what we would think are his comfort zones; he actually relishes the opportunity to impose rigour on other fields and to encounter new challenges that inspire new theoretical developments.

Jose Meseguer is remarkably generous in sharing and discussing the many ideas emanating from his fertile mind, and is genuinely curious and appreciative of other opinions.

Jose Meseguer was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2020 "for the development of logical methods for design and verification of computational systems".