Dorit Aharonov

"Today’s quantum ecosystem is extremely vibrant, and there is a lot of energy and focus on particular questions"

"I think there are advantages and disadvantages to that. I would like to see more stamina from the community when it comes to looking into the more difficult questions that have less immediate reward — like, for example, deeply understanding quantum algorithms."

"The thing is that people have tried a lot with few successes, but I don’t think that too many people have tried enough"

"I think there are more algorithms down that road — very interesting ones — but it will probably be difficult to come up with them."

"One very, very interesting thing about quantum computation is that it touches so many different fields in mathematics"

"It’s not like that in classical computation. It’s really something that is special for quantum computation because it’s somehow ‘complete’ — quantum computation is some kind of completion, mathematically, of classical computation."

"I think of this as maybe similar to the fact that the complex numbers are an algebraic closure of the real numbers. And quite similarly again, the problems in the quantum model often have richer connections between them; they somehow ring ‘right,’ mathematically."

"There are so many different universal models of quantum computers, each one based on a completely different algorithmic approach — like adiabatic computation, quantum walks, measurement-based quantum computation, topological quantum computation, and more — and they are all essentially equivalent,” she said. “You don’t really know which direction the next quantum algorithm will come from."

"Previous papers, and in particular Hastings’ first papers on topological obstructions, manage to show that stoquastic adiabatic computation is capable of understanding something about the global structure of a problem."