{"id":4877,"date":"2011-06-15T16:20:38","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T23:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=4877"},"modified":"2011-06-15T16:20:38","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T23:20:38","slug":"oh-the-places-ive-been","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2011\/06\/15\/oh-the-places-ive-been\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh the Places I've Been!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1996 I participated in Caltech<\/a>‘s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship<\/a> program under the direction of two postdocs, Nicolas Cerf<\/a> and Chris Adami<\/a> (their big boss now works the halls of D.C.) The research project I worked on was to try to see whether quantum computers could efficiently solve NP-complete problems. Or as I like to say, my SURF was spent bashing my head up against the wall (and getting damn good at tensor products and spotting non-linear transforms, as you can see from my SURF writeup. John Preskill<\/a> told me after my talk, in the first words he ever uttered in my direction: “that was a hard problem you worked on.”)
\nMy SURF project was not my first introduction to quantum computing, but it was the first time I’d gotten a chance to bash my head up against the field, and something must have stuck. Because when I went to grad school<\/a> in Berkeley in 1997, after a year of taking astrophysics courses (if the cosmic microwave background was distributed this way or that way on the sky, this or that cosmological model could be ruled out, how cool is that!) I stumbled back into quantum computing through the group of Chemistry Professor K. Birgitta Whaley<\/a> and her postdoc Daniel Lidar. My first paper<\/a> in quantum computing was published in 1999, and I’ve been a proud participant in the growing field of quantum information science ever sense.
\nNow that I’ve decided that it is time for a change<\/a> and I’m moving out of the ivory tower and into the real world (academics, you see, manufacture their own reality, which is why they call everything outside of academia “the real world”), I thought it would be fun to indulge in a little bit of egotistical self-reflection, cataloging the joys that a decade plus spent in quantum computing has given me. \u00a0The joys of all of the papers I’ve written and all of the cool quantum computing stuff I’ve see? \u00a0No, that would be too easy. \u00a0Instead I thought it would be fund to think about the kind of crazy things that happen to you as life sweeps you along. \u00a0Or, as I like to say it, “Oh the places I’ve been!”
\n[Warning: self-flattering ego-inflating stories ahead!]
\nThings I’ve gotten to do that were pretty damn awesome:<\/p>\n