Enhancing the Efficiency of Adiabatic Quantum Computations

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So I am back in Boston.

This time for APS March Meeting 2019. It is taking place at the Convention Center.

The last time I was in this place was in 2005 when I was Founder and CEO of SmartOps, at SAP Sapphire, and we announced a bunch of things like (1) a multi-million dollar deal with Unilever and (2) becoming part of Industry Value Network (IVN) with Chemical and CPG Industry verticals that shook the SAP ecosystem. You can read about it in the Darden case study (now resold by Harvard Business School) about SmartOps.

First things first. Our fourth paper on quantum computing is now live:

Enhancing the Efficiency of Adiabatic Quantum Computations.

If you like math, physics, and computing: you will love this paper.

It is beautiful. It is also useful.

We begin with an insight from 1927 (by F. Hund), formalized by Wigner and von Neumann in 1929, and repurpose it, through Morse and Cerf theory, and make adiabatic quantum computations more efficient.

You may recall one of my quotes from Cronin and Loewenstein’s The Craft of Creativity:

Elegance is not something that should be considered discretionary, but rather an intrinsic feature of a proposed solution. The tragedy in some academic circles is that they make elegance the “whole thing,” losing sight of the problem to be solved, while the pragmatic sort do not have the luxury for aesthetic considerations. The intersection of elegance and effectiveness is the essential intellectual challenge.

Next, it is with great pride that I want to spread the good word, that a CMU professor, and one of only two Physics professors who has come to visit me in my Tepper office, Randy Feenstra, was awarded the APS Davis-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics (I have no idea what it means😏):

For pioneering developments of the techniques and concepts of spectroscopic scanning tunneling microscopy.

Who is the other CMU Physics professor who has visited me at Tepper?

Well, let us start with what I think is the most elite prize from APS:

Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.

Why?

1959: Murray Gell-Mann (Nobel 1969)

1960: Aage Bohr (Nobel 1975)

1965: Freeman Dyson

1970: Y.Nambu (Nobel 2008)

1971: Roger Penrose

1973: Kenneth Wilson (Nobel 1982)

1974: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel 1983)

1976: Stephen Hawking

1977: Stephen Weinberg (Nobel 1979)

1979: Geard ‘t Hooft (Nobel 1999)

1996: Roy Glauber (Nobel 2005)

1998: Ed Witten (Fields Medal 1990)

You get the drift. (I hope.)

So, who is the other CMU professor I am talking about?

1984: Bob Griffiths.

Bob gave me a signed copy of his book, Consistent Quantum Theory, that I am reading now.

Of course, now that I am in Boston, I am going to be hanging out with my friends.

Tonight it was great to reminisce with Joost Vlassak (professor at Harvard SEAS, Belgian, who studies materials) and Renaud Megard (manufacturing entrepreneur, French, who makes labels using cool technology).

(No, no fights broke out between the French and the Belgian.)

We discussed (among other things):

Cannabis: How to package it in a sustainable way

Burgundy wine: How to optimally label it for US market

NASA Probe to the moon: How NFI made the US flag labels

Looking forward to tomorrow in Boston!


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