Who Are the Godfathers of Quantum Computing?

A handful of people, most of them working alone with a pencil and no quantum hardware anywhere, gave quantum computing its machine and its first algorithms in little more than fifteen years. Today’s quantum chips are still built on their papers. The godfathers of quantum computing are Paul Benioff, Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, Peter Shor, Lov Grover and Seth Lloyd. Benioff showed in 1980 that a computer could be built from a quantum system, Feynman argued in 1981 that only a quantum machine could simulate nature, and Deutsch described the universal quantum computer in 1985. Shor and Grover gave it algorithms worth running in 1994 and 1996, and Lloyd turned Feynman’s simulation idea into a theorem. Paul Benioff. His 1980 paper showed that a Turing machine, the standard model of a computer, could in principle be built from a quantum system. He was the first to describe a computer in quantum terms. Richard Feynman. His 1981 Endicott House talk argued that ordinary computers cannot efficiently simulate quantum systems, so the simulator should be built from quantum parts. David Deutsch. His 1985 paper described the universal quantum computer and the first problem on which a quantum computer could beat a classical…