Aspiring Physicist. Studying a Maths and Philosophy degree at Durham and trying to fix payroll at Onfolk. Previously building a better bank at Monzo.
by Charles Thomas
I first became interested in Quantum Computation when I was 15 but at the time I really struggled to start learning it. On reflection, this wasn’t because it was too hard for me to learn, but rather I didn’t know what order to learn the things in and I didn’t have many of the prerequisites. So to remedy that, now 7 years on, I have put together this course to take you from knowing nothing about quantum computing to being able to get stuck in.
Before, I go and talk about the course, let’s quickly talk about what is quantum computing? Simply put quantum computing is using quantum mechanics in order to speed up certain computational problems. It is a very active area of research as we are finally beginning to get working quantum computers that we can use.
This means that quantum computing requires learning a little bit of quantum mechanics but don’t worry this series will walk you through it from scratch.
The series is split into 3 main sections. The first section will teach you all the maths you need to know. You don’t need to master everything in each post as you can come back and refer to them later. But it will walk you through the following topics: set theory, complex numbers and basic linear algebra. Which I promise are all less scary than they sound.
The second section gets to work explaining quantum mechanics. Since quantum computing uses quantum mechanics, this section explains the basics of quantum mechanics so words like entanglement are a bit less scary. All you’ll need is the maths from the first part.
Finally, the third section is where we can dive into quantum computing. It walks you through the very basics of quantum computing and even gets you to write your very first program for a quantum computer. Over time, this is the section where I am going to keep adding new content.
Here are links to all the course posts in order so please jump in. Please reach out if you have any questions