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Peter Shor
Peter Shor
You can see why I chose a career as a scientist rather than as
a poet.
And here is
a less frivolous poem.
I gave a talk about Minkowski's and Keller's cube tiling
conjectures, their motivations, and their eventual proof and disproof,
in the IAP Mathematics Lecture Series, on January 26, 2004. The
history of these conjectures is quite interesting, as Minkowski's original
conjecture was motivated by a question about Diophantine approximations,
but on the way to their resolutions, these conjectures mutated into questions
about tiling high dimensional spaces with cubes, about finite Abelian groups,
and about the structures of certain specific graphs.
The lecture notes are
here
(with some typos fixed 02-08-02).
The homework problems are
here.
I often get asked what are some good reference material about quantum
computation.
A good textbook is
Nielsen and Chuang.
Good course notes at the web are available from
John
Preskill, which may soon become a book,
Umesh Vazirani, and
David
Mermin. This last course (David Mermin's) is especially directed at
computer scientists. It has now been turned into a book.
For my recent courses, I have used MIT's Stellar course management system. Here are some websites for older courses I taught: In spring 2010, I taught 18.436J/8.371J.
In Fall 2008, I taught 18.435.
In Spring 2008, I taught 18.424: Seminar on Information Theory. Here is the website for the class.
I also co-taught 18.409/6.443/8.371 with Isaac Chuang.
In Spring 2007, I taught 18.424: Seminar on Information Theory.
In Fall 2006, I taught 18.435: Quantum computing and 18.091: Mathematical Exposition and
In Spring 2006, I co-taught 18.409/8.371J/6.443J. This was
an advanced course on quantum computation
Here is the web page
for this course.