Christopher Strachey co-founded the field of denotational semantics that provided a strong mathematical foundation for computer programming languages. Denotational semantics is a technique for giving precise meaning to a programming language. While the syntax (grammar) of a programming language is formally specified in various texts and user guides, the more important part of defining its semantics (the relationship between words or symbols and their intended meanings) is normally left to natural language, making it open to interpretation when used in programming languages. To create a better understanding, the programming language is defined by a valuation function that maps programs into mathematical objects considered as their denotation (i.e., meaning).

Strachey was the first professor of computation at Oxford University in Oxford, England. During his tenure, Christopher Strachey invented the term "currying," meaning to turn an "uncurried" function into a "curried" function. (A curried function is defined as a...