 | |
| Author | Scott Aaronson |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Publication date | 2013 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 398 |
| ISBN | 978-0521199568 |
| Website | Official website |
Quantum Computing Since Democritus is a 2013 book on quantum information science written by Scott Aaronson. [1] It is loosely based on a course Aaronson taught at the University of Waterloo, Canada, the lecture notes for which are available online. [2]
Aaronson has stated that he intends the book to be at the same level as Leonard Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum or Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality ; [3] Physics Today compared it to George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity . [4] The book covers everything from computer science to mathematics to quantum mechanics and quantum computing, starting, as the title indicates, with Democritus.
The front cover image is an oil canvas painting of Democritus by Hendrik ter Brugghen dated 1628. [5] It depicts Democritus as a young, laughing hedonist who points in the distance, as to where the folly of mankind is found.
The image invokes Aaronson's discussions [6] on Democritus' concept of atoms and the void, which forms the foundational understanding of matter at the atomic level, is relevant to quantum computing, where manipulating and controlling individual quantum objects for calculations echoes the early atomic theory's significance.
Scott Aaronson is a professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. He was previously a member of faculty at MIT. [7]
Michael Nielsen called the book "a beautiful synthesis of what we know", [8] while Seth Lloyd praised it as "lucid", describing Aaronson as a "tornado of intellectual activity". [9]
In the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Avi Wigderson considered it to have "much insight, wisdom, and fun", but conceded that it "is not for everyone'. [10]
Atomic physics is the field of physics that studies atoms as an isolated system of electrons and an atomic nucleus. Atomic physics typically refers to the study of atomic structure and the interaction between atoms. It is primarily concerned with the way in which electrons are arranged around the nucleus and the processes by which these arrangements change. This comprises ions, neutral atoms and, unless otherwise stated, it can be assumed that the term atom includes ions.
Democritus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Abdera, primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe. None of his work has survived.
Theoretical chemistry is the branch of chemistry which develops theoretical generalizations that are part of the theoretical arsenal of modern chemistry: for example, the concepts of chemical bonding, chemical reaction, valence, the surface of potential energy, molecular orbitals, orbital interactions, and molecule activation.
Peter Williston Shor is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer.
Sir John Edward Lennard-Jones was a British mathematician and professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bristol, and then of theoretical science at the University of Cambridge. He was an important pioneer in the development of modern computational chemistry and theoretical chemistry.
Michael Aaron Nielsen is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.
Dorit Aharonov is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in quantum computing.
Ian Philip Grant, DPhil; FRS; CMath; FIMA, FRAS, FInstP is a British mathematical physicist. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Oxford and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1992. He is a pioneer in the field of computational physics and is internationally recognised as the principal author of GRASP, the General Relativistic Atomic Structure Program.
Atomism is a natural philosophy proposing that the physical universe is composed of fundamental indivisible components known as atoms.
Avi Wigderson is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America. His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, distributed computing, and neural networks. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science.
In quantum computing, the threshold theorem states that a quantum computer with a physical error rate below a certain threshold can, through application of quantum error correction schemes, suppress the logical error rate to arbitrarily low levels. This shows that quantum computers can be made fault-tolerant, as an analogue to von Neumann's threshold theorem for classical computation. This result was proven by the groups of Dorit Aharanov and Michael Ben-Or; Emanuel Knill, Raymond Laflamme, and Wojciech Zurek; and Alexei Kitaev independently. These results built off a paper of Peter Shor, which proved a weaker version of the threshold theorem.
Scott Joel Aaronson is an American theoretical computer scientist and David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of research are computational complexity theory and quantum computing.
In physics, a quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction. Quantum is a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents. The fundamental notion that a chemical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization". This means that the magnitude of the physical property can take on only discrete values consisting of integer multiples of one quantum. For example, a photon is a single quantum of light of a specific frequency. Similarly, the energy of an electron bound within an atom is quantized and can exist only in certain discrete values. Quantization is one of the foundations of the much broader physics of quantum mechanics. Quantization of energy and its influence on how energy and matter interact is part of the fundamental framework for understanding and describing nature.
Richard Erwin Cleve is a Canadian professor of computer science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he holds the Institute for Quantum Computing Chair in quantum computing, and an associate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Stephen J. Wiesner was an American-Israeli research physicist, inventor and construction laborer. As a graduate student at Columbia University in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he discovered several of the most important ideas in quantum information theory, including quantum money, quantum multiplexing and superdense coding. Although this work remained unpublished for over a decade, it circulated widely enough in manuscript form to stimulate the emergence of quantum information science in the 1980s and 1990s.
Maciej Lewenstein, is a Polish theoretical physicist, currently an ICREA professor at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels near Barcelona. He is an author of over 480 scientific articles and 2 books, and recipient of many international and national prizes. In addition to quantum physics his other passion is music, and jazz in particular. His collection of compact discs and vinyl records includes over 9000 items.
G. Peter Lepage is a Canadian American theoretical physicist and an academic administrator. He was the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University from 2003 to 2013.
Kate Page Kirby is an American physicist. From February 2015 to December 2020, Kirby was the chief executive officer of the American Physical Society (APS) and sits on the board of directors of the American Institute of Physics. Kate Kirby was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1989 for her "innovative application of methods of quantum chemistry to the quantitative elucidation of a diverse range of molecular phenomena." She was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1996 for her contributions to physics.
Monika Schleier-Smith is an American experimental physicist studying many-body quantum physics by precisely assembling systems of ultracold atoms. These atomic, molecular, and optical physics (AMO) engineered systems have applications in quantum sensing, coherent control, and quantum computing. Schleier-Smith is an associate professor of physics at Stanford University, a Sloan Research Fellow, and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient. Schleier-Smith also serves on the board of directors for the Hertz Foundation.
This glossary of quantum computing is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in quantum computing, its sub-disciplines, and related fields.