About the Speaker

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a computer scientist and computational theorist who used the minimax theorem to prove what is now known as Yao’s Principle.  He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Yao studied Physics at the National Taiwan University, before going on to complete a PhD in Physics at Harvard University in 1972 and a second doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975. He was awarded the Pólya Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1987, the Knuth Prize in 1996 and received the Turing Award in 2000 in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation.

Quantum Computing: A Great Science in the Making

In recent years, the scientific world has seen much excitement over the development of quantum computing, and the ever increasing possibility of building real quantum computers. What is the advantage of quantum computing? What are the secrets in the atoms that could potentially unleash such enormous power, to be used for computing and information processing? In this talk, we will take a look at quantum computing, and make the case that we are witnessing a great science in the making.