Author of the joint paper "Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem," which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines, Scott has had a research career spanning computer science, mathematics, and philosophy, characterized by a marriage of a concern for elucidating fundamental concepts in the manner of informal rigor, with a cultivation of mathematically hard problems that bear on these concepts. His work on automata theory earned him the ACM Turing Award in 1976, while his collaborative work with Christopher Strachey in the 1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the semantics of programming languages.
Scott also worked on modal logic, topology, and category theory. He has served as editor-in-chief of the journal Logical Methods in Computer Science.
