External links
- Leonard Cheshire Disability Archived 2010-12-15 at the Wayback Machine
- National Catholic Register Archived 2012-11-03 at the Wayback Machine
- Catholic News profile
Ilyas Khan KSG (born 1962) is a British technologist and businessman. He is the founder of Cambridge Quantum Computing.
Ilyas Tariq Khan was raised in Lancashire (North West England). [1] His grandparents emigrated to Britain in the 1930s. His early schooling was in the old Lancashire Pennine mill towns of Haslingden and then Accrington. [1]
When Khan was at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, he stayed at Netherhall House, [2] an Opus Dei student hall of residence. Although he was born a Muslim whilst at Netherhall House he became interested in Catholicism and especially the work of 20th century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar [3] and of John Henry Newman.
Khan is a merchant banker by training and started his career at the London firm of J. Henry Schroder Wagg & Co. Ltd. He was also the owner of the English football team Accrington Stanley [4] and the founder and publisher of the Asia Literary Review. [5]
Khan remains the non executive senior partner of Stanhill Capital Partners, [6] a merchant banking business with a focus on natural resources which he founded in 1998, during the 20 years (1989–2009) he spent living and working in Hong Kong. He was also one of the founding directors of Australia-based White Energy Company.
Khan has published on the subject of Quantum Information Processing, [7] and in 2015 he founded Cambridge Quantum Computing, [8] which builds tools for the commercialisation of quantum technologies with a focus on quantum software and quantum cybersecurity. In December 2021 Cambridge Quantum Computing merged with Honeywell Quantum Solutions [9] to form Quantinuum one of the world’s leading quantum computing companies, and Khan remained as CEO. [10] Khan is the largest shareholder after Honeywell. In 2023 Khan became Vice-Chairman and Chief Product Officer of Quantinuum. [11]
He is a Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge [12] and is also a fellow of the Judge Business School, where he is the "Leader in Residence". [13] His special interests include philanthropy and Wittgenstein, and he is a member of the British Wittgenstein Society.
Khan has lectured and published papers on Ludwig Wittgenstein, among other subjects. [14] [15]
Between 2015–2018 Khan served as chairman of the Stephen Hawking Foundation, which was established on the initiative of Professor Stephen Hawking to further the study of Cosmology, Astrophysics and Fundamental Particle Physics and to facilitate research into Motor Neuron Disease / Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (MND/ALS). [16]
Khan served two terms as the chairman of the prominent British charity Leonard Cheshire Disability (LCD) [17] — the largest organization of its kind in the world, with a presence in over 50 countries. [18]
Khan is the chairman of Topos Institute, [19] a non-profit research institute devoted to shaping technology for public benefit by advancing sciences of connection and integration.
Khan is a patron of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst, [20] which aims to make the collections and resources at Stonyhurst College more widely accessible. The project has the support of Lord and Lady Nicholas Windsor, Lord Guthrie, and Lord David Alton. [20]
In September 2015 Pope Francis elevated Khan to a Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great for his contribution to the Church and community. [21]
In 2015 Khan ranked 21st in The Tablet's list of Britain's most influential lay Catholics. [22] [23]
Khan is listed in the Catholic Herald 'Catholics of Today' supplements most recently in 2022, profiling leading Catholics in a wide range of spheres and industries. [24]
Sir Roger Penrose is a British mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.
Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace; building automation; performance materials and technologies (PMT); and safety and productivity solutions (SPS). Honeywell is a Fortune 500 company, ranked 115th in 2023. In 2023, the corporation had a global workforce of approximately 95,000 employees. The current chairman is Darius Adamczyk and the chief executive officer (CEO) is Vimal Kapur.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is an independent research centre in foundational theoretical physics located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1999. The institute's founding and major benefactor is Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist Mike Lazaridis.
Leonard Susskind is an American theoretical physicist, Professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests are string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.
The black hole information paradox is a paradox that appears when the predictions of quantum mechanics and general relativity are combined. The theory of general relativity predicts the existence of black holes that are regions of spacetime from which nothing—not even light—can escape. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking applied the semiclassical approach of quantum field theory in curved spacetime to such systems and found that an isolated black hole would emit a form of radiation. He also argued that the detailed form of the radiation would be independent of the initial state of the black hole, and depend only on its mass, electric charge and angular momentum.
John Phillip Preskill is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he is also the director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.
Gary William Gibbons is a British theoretical physicist.
Stonyhurst College as a school dates back to 1593 when its antecedent, the Jesuit College at St Omer, was founded in Flanders to educate English Catholics. The history of the present school buildings dates as far back as 1200 AD.
Leonard Cheshire is a major health and welfare charity working in the United Kingdom and running development projects around the world. It was founded in 1948 by Royal Air Force officer Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC.
Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.
Raymond Laflamme, OC, FRSC is a Canadian theoretical physicist and founder and until mid 2017, was the director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. He is also a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Laflamme is currently a Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information. In December 2017, he was named as one of the appointees to the Order of Canada.
Don Nelson Page is an American-born Canadian theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada.
The Grand Design is a popular-science book written by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and published by Bantam Books in 2010. The book examines the history of scientific knowledge about the universe and explains eleven-dimensional M-theory. The authors of the book point out that a Unified Field Theory may not exist.
Bob Coecke is a Belgian theoretical physicist and logician who was professor of Quantum foundations, Logics and Structures at Oxford University until 2020. He pioneered categorical quantum mechanics, Quantum Picturalism, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat model for natural language, and quantum natural language processing (QNLP). He is a founder of the Quantum Physics and Logic community and conference series, and of the journal Compositionality.
Sir Nigel Hugh Robert Allen Broomfield was a British diplomat.
In quantum computing, a qubit is a unit of information analogous to a bit in classical computing, but it is affected by quantum mechanical properties such as superposition and entanglement which allow qubits to be in some ways more powerful than classical bits for some tasks. Qubits are used in quantum circuits and quantum algorithms composed of quantum logic gates to solve computational problems, where they are used for input/output and intermediate computations.
Quantum volume is a metric that measures the capabilities and error rates of a quantum computer. It expresses the maximum size of square quantum circuits that can be implemented successfully by the computer. The form of the circuits is independent from the quantum computer architecture, but compiler can transform and optimize it to take advantage of the computer's features. Thus, quantum volumes for different architectures can be compared.
Quantinuum is a quantum computing company formed by the merger of Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum Solutions. The company's H-Series trapped-ion quantum computers set the highest quantum volume to date of 1,048,576 in April 2024. This architecture supports all-to-all qubit connectivity, allowing entangled states to be created between all qubits, and enables a high fidelity of quantum states.
