About me

My name is Jad Issa. I am a mathematician and computer scientist with focus on logic and the formal verification of computer programs. I am currently preparing a Ph.D. with the Qbricks team at CEA LIST Paris-Saclay and the MOCQUA team at the LORIA lab attached to Université de Lorraine. Public information is available about my ongoing Ph.D. thesis at theses.fr My current work is focused on the formal verification of quantum and hybrid (quantum/classical) programs. I am especially interested in formally characterising the accuracy and resource consumption of such programs that may possibly have errors. I also teach some courses at Université Paris-Cité.

CV summary

I studied a double bachelors in mathematics (Lebanese University) and computer science (American University of Beirut). Afterwards, I did a first year of masters in pure mathematics at Université Paris-Saclay funded by the excellence scholarship of the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard. My second year of masters was again double: in mathematical logic and the foundations of computer science at Université Paris-Cité and in applied algebra at Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Along the way, I had a year of general engineering at the Lebanese University with introductory material.

Conferences

• QPL, Varna, Bulgaria, 2025.

  Poster: Statically evaluating termination and estimating the resources of quantum programs.
• VQC workshop @ CAV, Zagreb, Croatia, 2025.

  Poster: Statically evaluating termination and estimating the resources of quantum programs.

Talks

• Static analysis of quantum/classical programs using hybrid path-sums, OLAS seminar, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, Nov 2025.

• Statically evaluating termination and estimating ressources of quantum programs,

  • ASQ3 seminar, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France, Sep 2025.

  • PhD Day, LORIA, Nancy, France, May 2025.

• Type theory as new constructive foundations for mathematics, logic, and computer science, American University of Beirut, Seminar of the Department of Mathematics, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021.

Articles

Drafts ommitted for confidentiality agreements and the anonymity of the review process

• * A review of Cartesian closed categories, string diagrams, monads, and optics, Université Paris-Saclay, 2023. (PDF)

• * Direction in the study of the double-critical graph conjecture, American University of Beirut, 2020. (PDF)

• * Flip distance on convex polygons and interval graphs, American University of Beirut, 2021. (PDF)

* means the article is not published in a journal or conference proceedings.

Teaching

Check Teaching for more information.

Secondary interests

I'm very interested in philosophy of mathematics and logic and apparent interaction with ontology and epistemology. I am strongly driven by a general principle of extensionality/structuralism that the only truths and realities are those that can be in some sense seen or interacted with, in total contrast with Plato's theory of forms, objects have no intrinsic existence, truth, or structure. This further drives me towards what I call "axiomatic synthesis": given a context, an appropriate language and appropriate axioms are declared, and from there truths and structures are constructed rather than discovered. I hold the opinion that accepting a monadic, absolute, immutable truth to be sought after, with it being sometimes provably unreachable is a dangerous acceptance of authoritarianism and obedience, and is an insult to human intellect. This influences my general research approaches towards the pragmatism of theories and formalism as well as their cleanliness and efficiency.

I am also interested in theoretical physics, including QFT and the standard model without being serious knowledgeable about them. The application of the theory to reality is secondary to me with the mathematical constructs being the most interesting. I'm therefore interested in things like string theory independently of their validity as or if experimental data arises.