Background
Tofte was born in Lyngby, Denmark and grew up in Holbæk, Denmark.
Tofte was born in Lyngby, Denmark and grew up in Holbæk, Denmark.
Tofte was born in Lyngby, Denmark and grew up in Holbæk, Denmark. He studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Copenhagen where he obtained an Master of Science degree (with supervisor Neil Doctorate Jones) in 1984. Then at University of Edinburgh where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1988 (advised by Robin Milner).
He is doctor honoris causa 2007 from Kingston University.
This has close connections to self-application in partial evaluation. In his Doctor of Philosophy thesis he developed and proved correct the first sound type system for Master of Laws-style polymorphic references, an important open problem at the time. Moreover, he formalized a variant of the module system of the Standard Master of Laws programming language.
Mads Tofte is a co-author of the Definition of Standard Master of Laws and the associated Commentary, probably the most precise description developed for any realistic programming language.
He co-developed the Master of Laws Kit, an implementation of Standard Master of Laws whose structure closely follows the Definition. Subsequently he developed (with Jean-Pierre Talpin) the notion of region inference, a program analysis and memory management technique that avoids or minimizes the use of garbage collection.
This work was first published in POPL 1994 and in 2005 it earned the Association for Computing Machinery (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)) POPL 1994 Most Influential Paper Award. In the late nineties he co-developed (with Fritz Henglein and others) a type system and a sophisticated tool called AnnoDomini for mitigation of the Year 2000 problem in Common Business Oriented Language software.
The tool analyses legacy programs to discover all data fields that are used as dates.
This work was presented in a POPL 1999 invited keynote. In April 1999 he was appointed the first managing director of the Information Technology University of Copenhagen. The first students started 5 months later in September 1999.
Since 2003 he has been vice chancellor of the Information Technology University of Copenhagen.