Benjamin Schumacher
Template:Short description Template:Infobox person Benjamin "Ben" Schumacher is an American theoretical physicist, working mostly in the field of quantum information theory.<ref name=whatsup />
He discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information in a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. This was the quantum analog of Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, and it helped to start the field known as quantum information theory.
Schumacher is also credited with inventing the term qubit along with William Wootters of Williams College, which is to quantum computation as a bit is to traditional computation.
He is the author of Physics in Spacetime,<ref name=pstbook /> a textbook on Special Relativity, and Quantum Processes, Systems, and Information (with Michael Westmoreland), a textbook on Quantum Mechanics. Schumacher is a professor of physics at Kenyon College, a liberal arts college in rural Ohio. He is the lecturer in four courses produced by the Teaching Company: Black Holes, Tides, and Curved Spacetime: Understanding Gravity; Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World; Impossible: Physics Beyond the Edge; and The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Schumacher earned his bachelor's degree at Hendrix College, where he met his wife, mathematician Carol Schumacher.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> His Ph.D. is from the University of Texas at Austin, where his advisers were Richard Matzner and John Archibald Wheeler.
Influential research papers
See also
References
External links
- Zeroth Order Approximation - Blog by Benjamin Schumacher
- Benjamin Schumacher Homepage
- Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World
- The Physics of Impossible Things, Speaker: Ben Schumacher, 03/12/2008, PIRSA - Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive