Quantum Computing
Yuri Manin
Raised the idea of quantum computing in 1980, a year before Feynman's talk.
1937 Simferopol – 2023 Bonn · Soviet Union, later Germany
Who they were
A Soviet-born mathematician of the first rank, working in number theory and algebraic geometry, who spent his later career at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. He was also a writer of unusual breadth on language and thought.
What they found or built
In a short passage of his 1980 book Vychislimoe i nevychislimoe ('Computable and Non-computable'), published in Moscow, Manin pointed out that a quantum system has far more states than a classical system of the same size, and suggested that this might be exploited to compute, or at least that simulating it classically would be hard.
Why it mattered
The book was in Russian, short on detail and little read in the West, so Manin's name is often missing from the story. But the logic is the same as Feynman's: the exponential size of quantum state space is both the obstacle to simulating nature and the opportunity for a new kind of computer.
Equations and key ideas
- Exponential state space
- The origin of the idea