Question: what makes your work different to other scientists?

Sarah Mount answered on 15 Mar 2010:

Well, that’s a great question! The weird thing about science is that it’s important to work in an area that is a “hot topic” but it’s also important to do work that’s really new. Often in Computer Science some people do very theoretical work, which is really more like maths, and other people do very practical work and build new systems. What I try to do is to take some interesting theoretical work and apply it to practical systems. I guess a recent example is that I wrote some software to apply some maths from the 1970s to a new programming language called Python. This particular maths (called “communicating sequential processes”, invented by the English scientist Tony Hoare) had been used in some programming languages, but often in an old fashioned sort of way and we wanted to make it available to modern programmers.