:: U Combinator

U Combinator is a research group in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. We research and develop advanced languages, compilers and tools to improve the performance, parallelism, security and correctness of software.

Academic members

• Matt Might (Faculty)
• Christopher Earl (Postdoc)
• William Byrd (Postdoc)
• Doaa Hassan (Postdoc)
• Shuying Liang (Ph.D. student)
• Steven Lyde (Ph.D. student)
• Thomas Gilray (Ph.D. student)
• Petey Aldous (Ph.D. student)
• Kimball Germane (Ph.D. student)
• Michael Ballantyne (Ph.D. student)
• Leif Andersen (B.S.M.S. student)
• J.T. Olds (Ph.D. Student, on leave)

Alums

• Andy Keep (Postdoc, now compiler engineer at Cisco)
• Christopher Earl (Ph.D., now postdoc at Utah)
• Tarun Prabhu (M.S., now Ph.D. student at UIUC)
• David Darais (B.S., now Ph.D. student at Harvard)
• Philip Mates (B.S., now Ph.D. student at Northeastern)

Interact with U Combinator

Point your IRC client at the channel #ucombinator on freenode.

Also, if you're a student, sign up for the Google group to get lab announcements:

U Combinator

Visit this group

Please don't sign up if you're not a student.

Code

Public access

We have a public code repository hosted on Google Code.

Member access

U Combinator members, check out the research repository:

  svn checkout https://www.ucombinator.org/svn/ucombinator/
    

Why the name U Combinator?

In the theory of programming languages, the U combinator, U, is the mathematical function that applies its argument to its argument; that is U(f) = f(f), or equivalently, U = λ f . f(f).

Self-application permits the simulation of recursion in the λ-calculus, which means that the U combinator enables universal computation. (The U combinator is actually more primitive than the more well-known fixed-point Y combinator.)

The expression U(U), read U of U, is the smallest non-terminating program, and U of U is also the local short-hand for the University of Utah.