Anthony Hey

Anthony Hey is a British computer scientist and author whose career has bridged academic research, science administration, and science communication. He earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford and subsequently moved into computer science, becoming a professor at the University of Southampton, where he worked on parallel computing and contributed to the development of high-performance computing systems. He later served in science leadership roles at Microsoft Research, where he focused on the emerging paradigm of data-intensive scientific discovery that he and colleagues described as the “fourth paradigm” of science.

As an author, Hey has contributed to the literature of computing education and science communication. He is co-editor of Feynman Lectures on Computation (1996), which compiled and edited the lectures Richard Feynman gave on computing at Caltech in the 1980s — a remarkable record of one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century grappling with the fundamental ideas of computer science. The volume has been valued both as a historical document and as an original, Feynman-inflected introduction to the theory of computation.

Hey is also the author of The Computing Universe: A Journey Through a Revolution (2014), co-authored with Gyuri Papay, which provides a broad and accessible history and overview of computing — from its mathematical foundations and early hardware to software, the internet, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. The book is aimed at readers who want to understand computing as a scientific and cultural phenomenon, not merely as a technological tool.

His career reflects the increasing importance of computing as a scientific infrastructure and as a subject worthy of historical and philosophical attention in its own right. Through his editorial, administrative, and writing work, Hey has helped bring the ideas of computer science to audiences beyond specialists.