Inaugural Lecture Series: Professor Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh Mehrnoosh shares her journey from logic and the origins of language to quantum computing, exploring how this path led her to new ways of understanding meaning and building AI systems. Abstract Words, numbers and quantum machines: Computing the semantics of language Beginning in the 1930s, the Polish logician Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, followed later by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, a pioneer of computational linguistics, showed how the structure of natural language could be described using mathematical rules. In the 1950s, the Canadian mathematician Jim Lambek built on this work to develop a calculus explaining how words combine to form phrases and sentences. In this inaugural lecture, I will trace my own journey through logic, the origins of language and the surprising role of quantum computing in semantics. I will show how linguistic structures can be translated into linear algebra, converted into quantum circuits and tested on quantum hardware. I will also present recent results from vision-and-language tasks. Together, these findings point towards a new generation of AI systems in which quantum computers may prove useful not only for learning from data, but also for learning from the structures through which meaning is created. About the speaker Mehrnoosh is Professor of Computer Science and a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair. She leads the Quantum Learning Labs. Her fascination with higher-order algebraic structures led her to study category theory and substructural logics, first at Sharif University of Technology in Iran, then at the University of Ottawa and the Université du Québec à Montréal, and later at Oxford. While in Montreal, Mehrnoosh worked with Canadian mathematician Jim Lambek, widely regarded as the father of algebraic linguistics. Her research helped to formalise the grammars of a range of human languages and ultimately provided a solution to the problem of semantics for