Andrew Steane

A physicist at Oxford who works on trapped ions and the theory of quantum information.

In 1996, at the same time as Robert Calderbank and Peter Shor, he showed how to build quantum error-correcting codes from classical ones. The Steane code protects one qubit with seven. The key trick is that you can detect which error occurred without measuring, and so destroying, the encoded state.

Before 1996 many physicists believed that errors made quantum computing impossible in practice. These codes, together with the threshold theorem, answered the objection and shaped all later work on fault tolerance.