John Preskill | |
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| Born | (1953-01-19)January 19, 1953 (age 72) |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Princeton University(B.A.), Harvard University(Ph.D.) |
| Known for | Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet, Hayden–Preskill thought experiment, Continuous-variable quantum information, NISQ era Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill code |
| Spouse | Roberta Preskill (2 children)[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical Physics |
| Institutions | California Institute of Technology |
| Thesis | Unified gauge theories without elementary scalar fields (1980) |
| Doctoral advisor | Steven Weinberg |
| Doctoral students | Peter Galison Daniel Gottesman Anton Kapustin Sandip Trivedi Graeme Smith (physicist) Nicole Yunger Halpern |
John Phillip Preskill (born January 19, 1953) is an Americantheoretical physicist and theRichard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at theCalifornia Institute of Technology, where he is also the director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.
Preskill is an active scientist in the field ofquantum information science andquantum computation, and he is known for coining the term "quantum supremacy"[2]and that of "noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ)" devices.[3]
Preskill was born on January 19, 1953, inHighland Park, Illinois. He attended Highland Park High School, from where he graduated as class valedictorian in 1971.[4] Preskill graduated summa cum laude fromPrinceton University with an A.B. in physics in 1975, completing his senior thesis, titled "Broken symmetry of the Pseudoscalar Yukawa theory", under the supervision ofArthur S. Wightman.[5]Preskill received hisPh.D. in the same subject fromHarvard University in 1980. His graduate adviser at Harvard wasSteven Weinberg.
While still a graduate student, Preskill made a name for himself by publishing a paper on the cosmological production of superheavymagnetic monopoles inGrand Unified Theories. Since we do not observe any magnetic monopoles, this work pointed out serious flaws in the then current cosmological models, a problem which was later addressed byAlan Guth and others by proposing the idea ofcosmic inflation.
After three years as a junior fellow of theHarvard Society of Fellows, Preskill became associate professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 1983, rising to full professorship in 1990. Since 2000 he has been the director of the Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech. In recent years most of his work has been in mathematical issues related toquantum computation and quantuminformation theory. He is known for coining the term "Quantum Supremacy" in a 2012 paper.[6]
Preskill has achieved some notoriety in the popular press as party to a number ofbets involving fellow theoretical physicistsStephen Hawking andKip Thorne. Hawking conceded theThorne–Hawking–Preskill bet in 2004 and gave Preskill a copy ofTotal Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia.
Preskill was elected as a Fellow of theAmerican Physical Society in 1991 and a member of theNational Academy of Sciences in 2014.[7][8]
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